BEAU COLBURN

Aperture 3 — Places And iPhone GPS

I’ve never really paid much attention to geo-tagging my photos, mostly because I didn’t have an easy way to do so. One of Aperture 3’s new features—one that was a very pleasant surprise—is the way that it can pull in GPS data from existing iPhone photos. It’s really brilliant in its simplicity.

I would guess that a very high percentage of Aperture users are also iPhone owners. This means that all you need to do is snap a single iPhone photo at your shooting location, and you can then use the GPS data from that photo to tag other SLR photos from the same location in Aperture. You don’t even need to import the photos from your phone into Aperture. You simply pull up a mini-browser that shows you the images on your iPhone (which has to be connected at the time). From there you select the image, creating a spot on the map. You can then assign as many other photos in your Aperture library as you’d like to this spot.

I’ve been hoping for years that to find an iPhone app that takes your location from the iPhone’s GPS, saves it, and then allows you to sync it back to your photos. (There may actually be something like this now.) This is much better. Viewing the photos on the iPhone’s camera roll is a quick and easy way to find the exact location, visually, that you are looking for.

I recently visited Los Angeles, and we went for a hike to the Griffith Observatory. I took a bunch of photos with my SLR on the way up, and from the observatory at the top. I also took a few along the way with my iPhone, but that’s all I needed. With those few iPhone photos, Aperture can pull the GPS info, and I can tag all the rest in a few clicks. Simple.

Ultimately, most of my favorite photos get sent to Flickr. As a bonus to all of this, when using Fraser Speirs’ excellent Flickr Export for Aperture uploading tool, all the GPS data is passed along from Aperture on export, and automatically added to Flickr.

In typical Apple fashion, Aperture 3 now takes something that I was interested in, but hesitant to jump into because there wasn’t a simple path to entry, and makes it even more user friendly than I could have imagined. It’s also interesting to watch how Apple has taken what is arguably the most consumer-friendly device ever, and leveraged its ubiquity to make an impact on one of their Pro apps. Geo-location data is something that I’ll always be happy to have connected to my photos, and now with this update, I don’t imagine ever not including it.

Flickr App & EXIF data

I was browsing through Flickr earlier and I noticed this photo from Gruber. The tags showed that it was processed with the Best Camera app, but the EXIF data was still there. Hmm. I also noticed that the photo was uploaded with the official Flickr app. I decided to test some things out (I did the same tests with Camera Bag as well, with the same results).

1. Uploading a photo from the desktop via the Safari does not maintain the EXIF.
2. Uploading a photo via email from within Best Camera does not maintain the EXIF.
3. Uploading a photo from the iPhone camera roll—that has been processed in Best Camera—via the Flickr app does maintain the EXIF.

What’s very interesting is that the EXIF data doesn’t appear when you check for it in Preview, yet the Flickr app keeps it. It does not appear to keep geolocation data, but the Flickr app allows you to “Tag Current Location” so if you’re uploading on the spot taken, it’s accurate (however, I tested it with a photo taken in NYC, and it tagged it as my home in Boston).

I’m not clear on exactly how this is happening, but until 3rd party apps are able to maintain the EXIF data, this is a great workaround.

I threw all my test photos into a Flickr set