Mass GPS tagging

[krzysiu]

Hello!

I'm recording GPS data via smartphone and then I join it with files. At least I'm supposed to do so. I often forget about that and I sort photos (filesystem catalog, basing on directories). So the photos with GPS data available in GPX files could be in any of directories. My bad.

I have about 40-70 GPX files and 15k shiny photos in 714 glorious directories. 1-5k of photos have GPS data saved in GPX files. Now, what I want to do is:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -geotag "f:\gpx\*.gpx" -R "f:\foto"

As I don't want to screw anything up, my question is: is it safe? What can go wrong? Did I miss some problems I may encounter?
1) I'm not afraid of exiftool breaking my files - I tested it many times and it never happened
2) I'm not afraid of date/time desync - even if it would be off by a few seconds, it's still fine with me
3) I could have some files without camera date taken. If DateTimeOriginal (default source) is absent will be there some fallback to other dates? I wouldn't want it.

As far, as I remember, the photos which are taken without GPS will be just ignored per GeoMaxExtSecs settings (i.e. photo is taken 5 minutes after last GPS data > ignore it).

BTW I wrote tutorial about some aspects of geotagging photos - if you are interested, check out https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php/topic,7369.msg37373.html - I'm proud of it

[Phil Harvey]

I would suggest only doing this for files that don't already have gps by adding -if "not $gps:all"

The command will create backups of the originals, so from this point of view it is safe.  If DateTimeOriginal doesn't exist then the file won't be tagged unless you specify other tag(s) for setting Geotime.

- Phil

[krzysiu]

Ha, I knew I forgot about something! Right, thanks

[StarGeek]

I've had several cameras over the years that insert GPS:GPSVersionID but no other gps tags, so GPS:all would evaluate to true even though there actually isn't any coordinates.  Because of this, I tend to use -if "not ($GPSLongitude and $GPSLatitude)" instead.

[Phil Harvey]

@StarGeek: Good point

[krzysiu]

Sorry if it's forbidden to bump topic in such way. I wanted to say thanks, mr. Stargeek!

Quote from my gallery system I'll be releasing soon:

Thanks list
(...)
Authors of websites and software:
(...)
ExifTool by Phil Harvey - not only great software, but also an amazing knowledge base and helpful users from bulletin board, including Phil himself

Yep, I'm sure about it