this year.

I have never found the location tagging in iPhoto 09 to be intuitive when trying to place photos in their exact location on a map. Not only do you have to do each photo separately, but you are required to create a place every time you place a pin in a unique location (as far as I can tell). The ideal situation is to geotag the photos before importing them into iPhoto. There are a number of methods to do that which I won’t cover in depth here. This post is going to explain how I was able to geotag old photos that were already in iPhoto.

I began geotagging my photos many years ago when flickr first started offering the service. I put a lot of time into geotagging each photo with its exact location (not just general area). The problem I ran into however was that I was unable to get that geodata out of flickr and into my original photos in iPhoto. This weekend I stumbled across a fairly manual process, but it goes pretty fast once you get moving.

(This process is being written from a Mac perspective. I will take a look for similar Windows solutions if there is demand.)

Assumptions:
-You have photos geotagged on flickr
-You have photos in iPhoto that you want to tag

Required:
-Geotagger – This program will insert the GPS coordinates currently centered in Google Earth into the Exif of your photos
-Flickr Photo Set to KML – This script will grab your geotagged photos from flickr and create a KML file that you can open in Google Earth
-Google Earth

Procedure:
It’s a fairly straight forward procedure. First locate the photoset on flickr that you want to use and copy the set number from the URL into the ‘Photoset to KML‘ site. Choose to download the KML and open it in Google Earth. Now locate the files in iPhoto that you want to geotag. I did this by selecting ’show package contents’ on the iPhoto Library file in my ‘pictures’ folder. Once viewing the contents go to the ‘originals’ folder then dig down until you find the folder with the images. (I think you might also be able to just open the event in iPhoto and drag the image from there to the Geotagger program.)

With the folder of images open on the computer, and the KML file loaded in Google Earth it is now just a matter of going to each image in Google Earth, letting it move to the location, then finding that same image in the pictures folder and dragging the file to the geotagger program on the dock. Most of my images were named with the default camera file name so it was easy to match up the images. Repeat this for as many photos you have to geotag.

The final step is selecting all the photos you just edited in iPhoto and cmd-clicking (right click) so that you can select the option ‘Rescan for Location’. Bam. All the images will now have the new location data and iPhoto will do a mediocre to decent job of rationalizing the GPS coordinates as a location name.