How to capture location, date and time to use to geotag photos?

iOS
1

Last year I posted a question related to a shortcut I was trying to build to help with geotagging photos. My camera doesn’t capture location information. In short, my goal is to easily capture my current location and date/time stamp while taking photos. Then, I extract the location info (latitude and longitude) and create a file that I can import into Adobe Lightroom to tag photos (based on date/time of photo) with location information.

Rather than the approach described in the linked post, I took a different approach using the track captured by my Apple Watch when recording a walking workout. I have no problems extracting the lat/lon and date/time from the Apple gpx file. As well, I am able to convert to a file that can be read by Lightroom. It “mostly” works.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, there are occasional location discrepancies between actual GPS location and what gets tagged in Lightroom.

So, I’m back here again to check in before I try to build yet another solution. Rather than extracting data from the AW workout, I would like to return to an asynchronous process where I just capture the event (lat/lon/date/time) as I take a picture.

There are some third party solutions but I would prefer a simpler “log them as I take them” approach.

At the risk of repeating, my requirements are fairly simple:
1. Capture a location/date/time on demand. Ideally triggered from my AW, but triggered from phone is fine, too.
2. Separate function to then extract all location/date/time entries from the file created in step 1.

Step 2 is straightforward. Step 1 is the question. A native Shortcuts solution could work, but it tends to be slow (getting current location). Drafts might be an option, though I’m having trouble extracting the location meta data using Shortcutus.

Is any one familiar with other solutions or any recommendations? Thanks

2

I have a very similar Shortcut that I use when out and about. I call it Drop a Pin and invoke it with the Siri phrase “Drop a Pin”.

It does use Get current location, and I do not find it to be too slow, at least for my use. I have a specific named note in Notes and the output gets appended to that.

Each line looks like this:

15 Mar 2024 at 12:08

41.81904115242227, 12.23210224648278

I use the same method with a Shortcut to add a note, which accepts a brief dictation for the text of the note and adds location and time data because I usually use it to record some observation while I am out and about.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/886c42f2150740329e7db1d8aaaf08d1

3

Thanks for the response. It has been a while since I’ve tried “get current location”. I’ll give it a go again and see if it works any better.

4

For those who might be following this post… I have found a third party plug-in for Lightroom that notably improves Lightroom’s map track import feature.

Jeffrey Friedl’s Geoencoding Support plug-in provides capability to import a GPX file. Importantly, though, it includes fuzzy date/time capability to improve the success rate of linking a photo to a track point. You can define a “within xx seconds” parameter to allow a wider window.

In other words, if your photo was taken at 09:32:34, yet your track point is at 09:32:55, Lightroom’s native import may not associate the track point with the photo. Friedl’s fuzzy time capability resolves that time gap issue.