Aperture vs Lightroom: Use Embedded GPS Info in Lightroom 4

This has been a long day com­ing for the Aper­ture vs Light­room blog. That’s because I’ve wasted a lot of time learn­ing how to use embed­ded GPS info in Light­room 4. 

UPDATE: Please read the update at the end of this arti­cle to find a res­o­lu­tion to the prob­lem I stated.

I thought it was a bug, but it turns out to be stu­pid user inter­face design by Adobe.

If you’ve fol­lowed the blog for a while, you may have seen my Intro­duc­tion to Maps where I spoke about the prob­lem in my sum­mary. Although my images were tagged with GPS meta­data, Light­room wasn’t show­ing that infor­ma­tion any­where. It wasn’t a prob­lem at all in Aper­ture, though. Every image I imported with embed­ded GPS meta­data quickly and eas­ily showed up on Aperture’s Places maps. Still, I fig­ured that it could be me who was doing some­thing wrong.

Fast for­ward to Feb­ru­ary 5^th and I was start­ing to become con­vinced it was a bug. After all, how could it be oth­er­wise? I scoured Adobe’s site and doc­u­men­ta­tion. Noth­ing use­ful. A plethora of Google searches lead to irrel­e­vant issues from pre­vi­ous ver­sions and plu­g­ins designed to over­come GPS tag­ging issues before Light­room 4 pro­vided sup­port for Maps. Still, noth­ing to tell me why files that I could prove had GPS meta­data embed­ded were seem­ingly stripped out by Light­room of that con­tent and didn’t show any­thing on the shiny new Maps mod­ule.  Had to be a bug, right?

Stu­pid User Inter­face Design

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that this is merely poor design on Adobe’s part. It should not take six months of scour­ing to dis­cover how to use a fea­ture — any fea­ture — of this prod­uct. As it turns out, I found the secret code to get­ting my GPS infor­ma­tion into Light­room. It’s not hard to do, but it isn’t intu­itive in the slight­est. In fact, it may even destroy over meta­data that you’ve added to your imported pho­tos. In other words, it doesn’t “just work” like the maps in Aperture.

How to Use Embed­ded GPS Info in Light­room 4

Before we get into the steps, let me clar­ify a cou­ple of points. When I spec­ify “embed­ded GPS”, I’m talk­ing about RAW files that have GPS infor­ma­tion asso­ci­ated with them from using a GPS on your cam­era. In my case, that’s a Nikon GP-1. Oth­ers are the Di-DPS or even the GPS from your smart phone. I’m not refer­ring to asso­ci­at­ing your pho­tos with a GPX track log in Lightroom.

Also, I found a cou­ple of peo­ple who claimed that it does “just work” for them. Jeff Rev­ell and I traded some mes­sages on Google+ and he indi­cated that he had no issues using this fea­ture with his Sony cam­era. The issue could vary depend­ing upon the RAW sup­port that Adobe pro­vides for each camera.

Light­room Import Preset

This is one of the first places I looked for a clue as to how to import my pho­tos with GPS metadata.

You can see GPS listed in the Cam­era Info sec­tion. The text inside says to leave it clear if you want the GPS to be blank and I was afraid that’s why my GPS data didn’t appear. How­ever, it doesn’t say what to type in order to tell Light­room 4 to use the GPS infor­ma­tion in my RAW file. I searched the Help file for this info, but there’s no detail shown for the var­i­ous fields in a Light­room Import Preset.

Read Meta­data from File

Here’s the secret to get­ting your embed­ded GPS infor­ma­tion into Light­room after you imported your photo.  From the Meta­data menu, select Read Meta­data from File.

It doesn’t specif­i­cally men­tion GPS, but that is a form of Meta­data and I fig­ured it was worth a shot. Once I tried it, I found it was time to take a leap of faith.

Not a large leap for me, of course, since I use a test cat­a­log in Light­room for the blog arti­cles. If I screw some­thing up, it’s not a big del because my real work gets stored in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent place.

If you haven’t used this com­mand before, I would encour­age you to cre­ate a sep­a­rate cat­a­log to try out these ideas before you do some­thing to your pro­duc­tion Light­room cat­a­log that you can­not reverse.

Don’t say that I didn’t give you fair warn­ing. Once you select this menu option, you get another warn­ing from Light­room that looks like this message.

Take a moment to under­stand this mes­sage, please. If you’ve spent your time adding or updat­ing meta­data on this file, that will all get over­writ­ten by what­ever meta­data that Light­room reads from the file. If you do this imme­di­ately after Import, then you won’t lose a thing in your cat­a­log. How­ever, doing this with exist­ing files that you’ve updated over time will mean los­ing that infor­ma­tion in order to read the GPS and other meta­data embed­ded in the file.

Once I selected the Read but­ton, I got the first sign of encour­age­ment from Light­room. Finally, Light­room showed me an indi­ca­tion that it was will­ing to trans­late my GPS infor­ma­tion into some­thing usable.

That brought up another ques­tion in my mind. Why is this an option? If I import GPS infor­ma­tion, why in the world wouldn’t you want to trans­late those GPS coor­di­nates into city, state and coun­try meta­data? Why wouldn’t you want it to show up on Google Maps? Why isn’t this state enabled by default?

For those who import a GPX track log along with their pho­tos, this is the tool that con­tacts Google Maps to look up the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion for each GPS coör­di­nate. Very handy, but it’s not some­thing you can find on a menu. Instead, it’s buried in the Cat­a­log Set­tings as a check­box on the Meta­data tab.

Once you enable this set­ting, you get another dia­log con­firm­ing that it’s enabled. Then you see the next clue that things are mov­ing in the right direction.

When I checked my photo meta­data in the Library mod­ule, I finally saw the coor­di­nates in the GPS field.

I wept with glee! My long, ardu­ous bat­tle to have my pho­tos show up in Lightroom’s Map mod­ule was nearly at an end. My hand wavered with hes­i­ta­tion before select­ing the Map to see an icon rep­re­sent­ing my photo location.

What if it wasn’t there? What if I’ve come this far and there was yet another hid­den step? I imag­ine some kind of rit­ual dance or a mambo with snakes before I actu­ally achieved my desired result.

Slowly, I clicked.

Light­room Nirvana!

I actu­ally didn’t move when I saw this, but my emo­tions were doing a happy dance. It was like train­ing a seem­ingly hope­less dog to fetch a ball and expe­ri­enc­ing that sen­sa­tion of joy when he finally brings it back to you.  Good boy, Light­room! It took you longer to learn this trick that Aper­ture does out of the box, but you finally got it.

Not with­out some addi­tional effort, frus­tra­tion and sheer con­fu­sion at why this just doesn’t work right away with my embed­ded GPS information.

Light­room still does not read my GPS infor­ma­tion upon import. Surely, there must be a way to have it read this data and I sus­pect there is some secret, undoc­u­mented code that goes into the GPS field of an Import Pre­set. Until then, I have to use the fol­low­ing workflow.

1. Import pho­tos into Light­room 4
2. Select pho­tos
3. CHoose Meta­data | Read Meta­data from File

That’s how I get my GPS infor­ma­tion before I enter any other meta­data to my pho­tos in Light­room. It’s an extra step or so that I hon­estly don’t feel should be nec­es­sary. I’m con­founded why the reverse geocod­ing isn’t enabled by default, but I’m sure that some Adobe designer has seem­ingly log­i­cal rea­sons for these errors in judgment.

If it seems that I’m being a bit harsh on Adobe for this issue, you’re damn right I am! This has been a colos­sal waste of time and energy for me to deci­pher fea­tures that are poorly doc­u­mented and should have been enabled or intu­itive to acti­vate. It’s down­right stupid.

Dur­ing my searches to resolve this topic, I’ve found count­less other mes­sages of peo­ple ask­ing “How do I…” ques­tions about Lightroom’s Map mod­ule. My hope is that this post addresses some of them and saves time for a few folks so they don’t have to go through the same frustration.

Update: A Res­o­lu­tion from Adobe!

Before I wrote this post, I com­mented on a post at Adobe by Julianne Kost. She fol­lowed up with me on Fri­day by e-mail.  I shared this post with her and she spot­ted my prob­lem right away. The fix is easy, sim­ple and allows you to import your GPS meta­data from cam­era into Light­room with­out the need to use the Read Meta­data from File method that I men­tion above.

If you look at the first screen­shot under Light­room Import Pre­set above, sim­ply uncheck GPS under Cam­era Info. It’s that simple.

At first, I felt rather silly about going through this entire post when the answer was that easy. Instead of Stu­pid User Inter­face prob­lems, I felt like a Stu­pid User.  After a while, that feel­ing faded and I felt a bit more jus­ti­fied about my rant. Here’s why.

Note what I wrote imme­di­ately after show­ing that screenshot:

You can see GPS listed in the Cam­era Info sec­tion. The text inside says to leave it clear if you want the GPS to be blank and I was afraid that’s why my GPS data didn’t appear. How­ever, it doesn’t say what to type in order to tell Light­room 4 to use the GPS infor­ma­tion in my RAW file. I searched the Help file for this info, but there’s no detail shown for the var­i­ous fields in a Light­room Import Preset.

It was clear to me that some­thing about that set­ting was wrong. Why did I bother to check it in the first place?  Because I read the instruc­tions in the Adobe Help file.  Par­tic­u­larly, this sec­tion of the Help file.