Geo-tagging Pictures in iPhoto

One of the features of iPhoto is the ability to identify where a picture was taken. Once you have tagged your photos with the geographic location, the "Places" tab under "Library", selectable from the left panel in iPhoto, provides a world-wide map of where your pictures were taken. This map can be displayed in three different modes by choosing a button in the upper right corner of the map display. One shows the geographic boundaries and a topographical display in "Terrain" mode, one is a satellite display in "Satellite" mode, or finally a "hybrid" of the two which takes the satellite display and imposes country boundaries on it.



A pin identifies the location where you have taken any pictures that have been tagged with the geographic information about where they were taken. When you hoover your cursor over a pin, a label appears with the name of the place. If you click on the arrowhead to the right of the label, all of the tagged pictures taken at that location appear in the main window. You get back to the map by clicking the "Map" button in the upper left corner of that window.

You can focus on a particular part of the world by clicking on the drop-down lists that appear in the upper left corner of the map window. The drop-down that appears lists alphabetically all of the countries, states, cities, and places that you have identified when tagging your pictures.

When you focus on a location, such as a country, the number of pins displayed can increase because locations can be identified in more detail. If you were to select a country in which you only visited one city, the map will automatically zoom in to that city and display all the places in the city where you took a picture that has been tagged.

So How Do Your Pictures Get Tagged?

Pictures taken with your portable Apple device such as an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, that have Location Services turned on, are automatically tagged with the GPS coordinates when the picture is taken. Many new cameras have GPS built in. It is also possible to get SSD memory cards for cameras that have GPS built-in so photos are automatically tagged when they are saved to the card.

If you don't have that capability, or if you accidentally had Location Services turned off on your Apple device, or your camera, for whatever reason, was not able to communicate with a GPS satellite when your picture was taken, you may have to tag your photos with the GPS information manually. To do this you make use of Google Maps.

Create a Bookmarklet For Your Browser

The first thing you should do is create a bookmarklet which you will use when identifying a location in Google Maps.

In your favorite browser, choose to add a bookmark. You will want to locate this bookmark so it appears along with the others that appear above your main browser window. In Apple Safari and in Google Chrome, that location is called the "Bookmarks Bar". When adding the bookmark, type a short name for it such as "GPS". Then for the address, where you ordinarily add a URL, enter the following javascript:

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

Make sure you have saved this bookmark and that it appears with the name you gave it along with your other favorite bookmarks above the main browser window.



In iPhoto, select the picture you want to tag. Then click on the "Info" button along the bottom right of the iPhoto window. One of the items that appears at the bottom of the Info panel is a map. If the picture hasn't been tagged with a location, the map is a grey map of the world with a field above the map in which appear the words, "Assign a Place . . ."



You can just type in that field the name of the place where the picture was taken. If you have other pictures with that name assigned, the name will appear at the top of a list from which you can select. Otherwise, a Google search for the place is performed. If the place you are looking for appears on the list that is displayed, you can simply select it. A map will be displayed with a pin suggesting a location where the picture was taken.

If you hoover your cursor over the map, a plus and minus sign will appear at the bottom which you can click to zoom in or out of the map. Also you are able to choose "Terrain", Satellite" or "Hybrid" for the type of map you want to display. There is also an icon to the right of the plus and minus signs, which when clicked, will cause the pin on the map to be centered in the window.



You may find that by zooming in, and moving the map around, you are able to locate where you were when the picture was taken. You can move the pin to the location on the map by grabbing the pin by clicking on the pin, holding the mouse button down until the cursor turns into a clenched hand, and dragging the pin to the location.

When performing the Google search for the location, if you type in an address for the name of a prominent structure such as the Eiffel Tower or Mount Rushmore, the pin will land on the structure. You may be satisfied with identifying the location of the picture to be that landmark. However, when taking a picture with a camera with GPS or an Apple devise, the location tagged is the location of the camera, not the location of the subject of the picture. For consistency and accuracy, the location of the camera is the location I prefer to use when tagging my pictures.

Again, you may be satisfied with simply moving the pin on the map in iPhoto to the approximate location where you were standing when you took the picture.

However, if, for example, you are doing genealogy research and are taking pictures of markers in a graveyard, exact location is very important. With GPS these days, accuracy can be within a few feet, depending on conditions.

This is where our bookmarklet comes into play.

Using the Bookmarklet

The first thing to do is to bring up your browser and, using Google Maps, find the location where you were when you took the picture. Take advantage of Street View and the photos that have been uploaded to Google Maps to determine that location with as much accuracy as you desire.

Once you have identified the location, with the cursor pointing to that location, right-click or control-click your mouse. A contextual menu will appear, and one of the items on the menu is "Center Map Here". Select that item. You will see the map shift so the location you are interested in is centered in the browser window.

Now click on the bookmarklet you created above the browser window. A small window will appear which contains the GPS coordinates of the location in the center of the map.

Copy those coordinates. Go over to iPhoto and paste them in the "Assign a Place . . ." field above the map in the Info panel. iPhoto will place a pin on the map at those coordinates.

You can leave the GPS coordinates as the name of the place if you wish. Otherwise, you can type over the GPS coordinates with a place name of your choice. You will then be able to use this same place name for all other photos you took at that location.

It takes time and some work to get your photos geo-tagged. I am happy that I was able to take the time to make the effort. It is rewarding to be able to choose a location on the map in iPhoto and see all the photos you took when you were there.

I set out to acquire a mountain lion trophy

I decided it was time to install Mountain Lion on my MacBook Pro.

I usually wait to upgrade anything until the early adopters have worked with the producer of the software to iron out the bugs that inevitably show up.  Also, I want to give the third party developers of other software a chance to get their products to work with the new operating system or the new hardware.  I try always to wait until we are past version 1.0 and are on at least version 1.1.

I finally have a reason to upgrade

One thing caught my eye and made me realize I was missing out by not having Mountain Lion.  My cable box has two tuners.  This means I can only record two programs at a time or record one program while watching another.  In my local TV-watching area, “Nikita”, “Grimm”, and “Fringe” all come on at the same time.  So I recorded “Nikita” and “Fringe”.  I can watch “Grimm” the night after it airs by going to the NBC web site.  But that means watching it on a small screen like my iPad or my MacBook Pro.  Mountain Lion may offer me an alternative!

With Mountain Lion comes AirPlay.  That means, as I understand it, with an AppleTV hooked up to what I euphemistically call my "entertainment center", I can navigate to the NBC web site and start up “Grimm” and watch it on the TV screen.

Preparing for the upgrade

I first made sure I had a bootable backup of my MacBook Pro's hard drive.  I use Personal Backup from Intego for that purpose.  It actually uses your previous backup as a basis and just does an incremental backup, so that takes a much shorter time than a full backup would.  I had to run it twice.  The first time it reported scanning 1,393,340 files, resulting in a task of copying 474,245 files and deleting 61,603 files.  It ended up copying 471,615 files in 3 hours, 22 minutes.  But I ended up getting 3900 errors.  It appeared to me, looking at the error log, that it was trying to find documents on my laptop that no longer exist.  Running it a second time, it scanned 1,330,497 files (since it had deleted the 61,000 files) resulting in a task of copying 242,979 files and deleting 248 files.  This time it only reported five errors.  So I felt I had a good bootable backup that I could use if an emergency arose.

Just to be sure, I rebooted from the bootable backup. One of the ways you can do this is by going into System Preferences and changing the Startup Disk.  The backup worked fine.  So I rebooted from my regular laptop hard drive.  

Next I looked at the RoaringApps web site.  This site gives you a very comprehensive list of applications and informs you of whether they are compatible with Lion or Mountain Lion.  Even though I found an application I use that isn't compatible with Mountain Lion, one that has some problems, and one that wasn't even listed, I decided to proceed anyway.

Ready to download the installer

The only way to get Mountain Lion is by downloading it from the App Store.

Once it was downloaded, I found an app called Install OS X Mountain Lion in my "Applications" folder.  The first thing I needed to do was to burn this app to a DVD.  This way if I ever run into problems where I have to reinstall Mountain Lion, I will have a ready copy of the installation application.  You will find that after you install Mountain Lion, this application will disappear from your “Applications” folder.

After that was done, I was ready to run the Install OS X Mountain Lion application.  The first thing I had to do is agree to the license.  Next, I was asked to select a place to install it. (My laptop hard drive showed up as the only choice).  The next thing I saw was, "Preparing to install.  Your computer will restart automatically".  It indicated there were 3 minutes remaining to finish.

After it completed that procedure, the message appeared "Will restart in __ seconds."  You may click a button to restart sooner.  It told me that it needed to close all open applications. Once I clicked my approval, it then proceeded.

The next message I saw was, "Installing OSX on the disk.  Time remaining: About 34 minutes."  The computer just sat there for at least a minute before I saw any change to the screen.  Finally I saw the progress bar move.

Mountain Lion is installed!

It finished an hour and fifteen minutes later. A message appeared stating that some of my software was not compatible and may cause problems, and therefore it was moved. The message said I could delete the software anytime I chose.  The two pieces of software it specifically mentioned were Parallels and VMFusion, both applications used to run Windows in emulation on my laptop.  An “Incompatible Software” folder was created at the root level of my laptop hard drive (the same place you find your “Applications” folder and your “Users” folder.)  There I found the files and applications that the installation process had moved.

The first application I opened, of course, was Mail.  A message appeared on the screen saying that the Antispam Engine would like to access my contacts to pre-populate my list of trusted e-mail sources. You are given the choice of OKing this or not.  It seemed a reasonable thing to do, so I OK’d it.

But then Mail crashed.  In the window that appears when an application crashes, the information in the crash report indicated that the creation of the Sandbox had failed and that the Container object initialization had failed.  I clicked to send the report to Apple and relaunch Mail.

This time a window opened with the message, “Welcome to Mail”.  I was also told that existing messages needed to be upgraded.  After OKing this, I was told that Mail was upgrading my Mail database.

Next I was asked about how I'm dealing with junk mail.  I was given three options: ask again later, stay in training, switch to automatic.  So I spent some time setting up Mail the way I'm used to using it modifying the tool bar, setting up how to handle junk mail, whether to show the side bar, etc.

Finally, I was able to look around to see if I could see if anything had changed to the desktop.  The first thing I noticed was a new icon to the right of the Spotlight magnifying glass in the Menu Bar.  It looks like a checklist.  This is the new Notification Center, which I anticipate may take the place of Growl.  I’ll have to make that decision after I have used it for awhile.  Right now, the only notifications I see in the Notification Center are those dealing with iCal.  When you click on the icon, your whole desktop moves to the left, and your list of notifications are displayed.  At the bottom is an icon that I guess is supposed to be a gear wheel.  When you click on it, System Preferences opens to the Notifications Preferences where you can choose how it will work for you.

Any new software updates after installation?

I decided at this point to check again for software updates that may apply specifically to Mountain Lion. 

The Software Update menu selection under the Apple icon in the menu bar took me to the App Store instead of opening the Software Update application like in Lion.  I couldn't see any way to ignore the one software update that I was told I needed.  It involved RAWimages compatibility when uploading pictures.  I don't have a camera that has the capability to download RAW images, so I didn’t need this software update.  I finally found the answer about how to ignore this update in the MacRumor forums.  The solution was to make sure that the full description of the update is showing. (You click on "More..." if necessary in order to show the full description.) Then you right click in the window.  "Hide update" will appear on the screen.  Click on that.  That hides the software update.  You can get it back later if you want to by selecting "Show all software updates " in the App Store "Store" menu.

The next thing I attempted was to open iPhoto. At my first attempt at doing this, iPhoto crashed.  On my second attempt, it Informed me that my photo library had to be updated and that large libraries could take hours to complete.  Mine took less than a minute.  But then there were two windows open, one normal window displaying pictures, another window with no pictures.  When I tried to close that one, iPhoto quit.  When I reopened it, everything was back to normal.

The next day I was asked if I want to enable dictation.  I was also warned that if I did, my contacts and other information will be sent to Apple.  I enabled it, but I don't expect to use it much.

By this time I was able to take stock of how much space I had lost on my hard drive by upgrading to Mountain Lion.  I was surprised that I actually saw a reduction of 4 GB of space used.

Up and running

So I am up and running with Mountain Lion.  For the work that I do, not much has changed that affects my day-to-day use of the computer.  Once  I got over the bumps described above, I haven’t had anything else that has interrupted my work.

So a week has gone by, and I was anxiously looking forward to viewing “Grimm” on my TV using AirPlay.  But when I called up the TV program in my browser and was ready to watch it, I couldn’t see how to get it to work.  I thought I was supposed to see an AirPlay icon in my menu bar or somewhere, like maybe in the browser window.  So I Googled my question and was taken to the Apple Support pages.  It turns out I don’t have a MacBook Pro that is able to use the AirPlay mirroring.  I have a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro and it requires an Early 2011 or newer.