Finding images that have GPS tags

Question

I have a rather clumsy and inefficient way to do this with exiftool, find, etc., but maybe there's a better way …

I have more than 24 thousand images, from several different devices.  I'd like to make lists of those that have GPS tags and those that don't.  Or one list with each identified as having or not.  And either at the same time or in a separate job, to reverse geocode a description of the location in an exif comment for those that have GPS.

Apple's Photos app sorts them by location but it keeps that info separate from the photo.  (And it currently crashes my laptop when I try to open the app)

LibreOffice Calc can handle more than 24K rows but I've seen its performance go to crap with large amounts of data. same for TextEdit. So I'll likely run the thing non-recursive in each directory. My "clumsy method" would take advantage of the fact that exiftool will leave the GPSDateTime field blank when no GPS data. I didn't know about the -if option—I'll have to look into that.

It was clumsy because I thought I would have to run each file to a temp file of tags, check for GPS in the temp file, and then do something with the image file based on that. So that is alleviated by the ability to put multiple files in one CSV list. But then I have further actions to take with the list, and that's daunting with more than three thousand directories.

Answer 1

Using exiftool, to get a simple list of all files that include a GPS coordinate, you could do this
exiftool -if "$GPSLatitude" -p "$FilePath" /path/to/files/

To get a Y/N in front is a bit more complex, because by default, exiftool won't print anything for missing tags. To work around this, the -f (-ForcePrint) option is used with -api MissingTagValue option to set the default to 'N'. Exiftool's Advanced formatting feature is used to print a 'Y' if the tag exists. The -srcfile option is used to read and prioritize XMP sidecars if they exist. The -ext (-extension) option is used to exclude XMP files, as it can be assumed they are sidecars
exiftool -srcfile %d%f.xmp -srcfile @ --ext XMP -f -api "MissingTagValue=N" -p "${GPSLatitude;$_='Y'} $FilePath" /path/to/files/

You might also look at exiftool's -csv option and get CSV file which you could then load into Excel/LibreOffice and see all the values directly. Also included is the -n (--printConv) option to output in decimal format rather than Degrees/Minutes/Seconds
exiftool -csv -n -GPSLatitude -GPSLongitude /path/to/files/ >out.csv

Replace /path/to/files/ with the actual path to the files you want to process. Add -r to recurse into subdirectories. If this command is run under Unix/Mac/Powershell, reverse any double/single quotes to avoid variable interpretation.

Answer 2

There are scripts in various languages, such as Python, or Windows PowerShell to extract latitude and longitude EXIF data. Sort output on value, so null will be grouped together.

Answer 3

Jhead is a command line program reads & alters EXIF data. Jhead is available for Windows and Linux. A batch file can extract GPS information.

A simple example of a Windows batch script using grep (Unix utility ported to Windows):

@echo off
for %%x in ("*.jpg") do (
echo %%x
jhead %%x | grep "GPS L"
echo, )

Sample output from the script:

IMG01.jpg

IMG02.jpg
GPS Latitude : N 40d  8m 33.70s
GPS Longitude: W 117d 52m 10.59s
 

In the example, IMG01 doesn't have any GPS tags, IMG02 has a GPS tag.

Google's Geocoding API looks like it can give you location information based on Lat/Long (You'll need to explore this).

Answer 4

What I did was simpler than what I first had in mind, but still not ideal:

find Sort_By_Date -type d -print | while read DIR; do                                                           
  exiftool -csv -FileName -GPSDateTime -GPSPosition -GPSAltitude "$DIR" > "$DIR/exif-list.csv"
done

Answer 5

I suggest IMatch (photools.com). It is a Digital Asset Management program that is incredibly powerful. I think the $150 one-time cost is well worth it.

Anyway, you could simply create a filter that showed all images in its database that did not have GPS data. It also has a very useful tool to help you assign GPS data to images by just clicking on a map.