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How to manually add Altitude info? #1
Nick Batos's picture
by Nick Batos
August 23, 2010 - 9:24am

Took pictures with a non-GPS enabled DSLR. I was able create a location via “Assign Location” which adds the Latitude/Longitude, but not Altitude information. Since this vacation dealt with a lot of hiking in Yellowstone/Grand Teton I wanted to add the Altitude info. Using Google Earth I can get the information, but can't figure out to get into an “edit mode” for the GPS Metadata view to let me enter the Altitude info into Aperture 3. Any ideas? Thanks!

=nb3=

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
August 23, 2010 - 12:23pm

Nick,

It doesn’t look like there is. You can’t edit the GPS metadata directly; as far as I know the only way to change it (in Aperture) is using Places. I even looked at the Applescript library and while there are hooks for accessing Latitude and Longitude through Applescript, there isn’t anything for Altitude.

You may have to rely on a third party application to modify those EXIF fields. If you do go that route, you can get Aperture to re-read the master file’s EXIF data from the command Metadata > Update from Master. That will pull any metadata changes back into Aperture.

If you decide to do that, remember that you’ll be modifying your master file, so be sure the files are backed up before you do it. There’s always a risk of corruption when modifying any file (which is why Aperture has such a hands-off approach to touching the master files), and your master images are no place to mess around :-)

Good luck,
-Joseph @ApertureExpert

@PhotoJoseph
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Nick Batos's picture
by Nick Batos
August 24, 2010 - 8:31am

Thanks Joseph- go figure with all the additional functionality added into A3, I find a lacking feature (IMHO). I am going to suggest this functionality to Apple and see where that goes…

This is a lesson to everyone to fully use any new hardware/software before use in an important business or personal activity. If I knew in advance of this issue I would have made sure to take a shot with my iPhone at various intervals if just to capture GPS info and then used A3’s “Lift Metadata” feature to copy that GPS info onto the shots I took with my D300.

Another kicker is that during this vacation to Yellowstone I began to use the Camera+ app on my iPhone4 only to just find out (as I was importing those pics into A3) that Camera+ strips out the GPS info from the EXIF file (I just read from their site that this limitation is due to Apple’s API not allowing the GPS info to be used in any non-Apple camera app)– go figure…

Thanks again for the detective work, much appreciated!

=nb3=

=nb3=

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
August 25, 2010 - 2:33am

Nick,

I don’t believe the iPhone captures altitude information either, does it? I have the 3GS still, and it does not—perhaps the iPhone 4 does?

I recently bought the Amod AGL3080 GPS Logger to use on my the cross-country road trip I recently completed (see the results of that at www.ConfessionsOfATravelJunkie.com if you haven’t!) and I used it exclusively in Places, so if there’s altitude data in the log, it was discarded. However, I know some people prefer to use other GPS plug-ins in Aperture to merge data from a logger—perhaps one of those might add in the Altitude data; even if you don’t have a log?

Here’s a few to look at: GPS2Aperture Pro and Maperture Pro and HoudahGeo and PhotoLinker (the last two are not plug-ins, but separate apps).

Good luck,

PS—and thank YOU very much… and you know why ;-)

@PhotoJoseph
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Nick Batos's picture
by Nick Batos
August 25, 2010 - 4:10am

I did use my new iPhone4 during the trip, and it does export Altitude info into A3 (seems to be the only way to do so, go figure only another Apple device combined with the Apple camera application is allowed to send that info…). Thanks for the links, I’ll check them out soon.

=nb3=

=nb3=

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