Geotagging with multiple track files

Started by geek65535, January 06, 2020, 12:39:34 PM

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geek65535

I'm working on a solution that uses data pulled from the Life360 app and stored locally to automatically geotag my images as they are ingested.
I've got this working, but Life360 isn't super accurate. It favors minimizing power consumption over frequent updates, so some of my images are getting tagged with locations that are hundreds of feet from where the image was actually taken. This is better than nothing, but not ideal.

While I'm mostly satisfied with this, I'd like to augment the data by using "GPS Logger" on my phone. That way if I've remembered to start GPS Logger before I shoot, I should have more accurate data from it. If not, I can fall back to the Life360 data. But this brings me to my question: how do I figure out which set of data to use? Ideally, I can give both files to exiftool, and exiftool would use the data with the highest accuracy (as indicated by the data itself). Then I don't have to worry about it.
If not, I'll have to figure out if I have a GPS Logger file that covers the right time frame and use it. I'm not sure if I can use exiftool do that. I was thinking that I could try to run exiftool with the GPS Logger files, and if it fails out, then switch to the Life360 files.

Does anyone know what exiftool's behavior is when given multiple gps files that cover the same time period?

Phil Harvey

ExifTool will take the GPS fixes from multiple files, sort them chronologically, and use the two fixes closest to the image time to geotag the image.

- Phil
...where DIR is the name of a directory/folder containing the images.  On Mac/Linux/PowerShell, use single quotes (') instead of double quotes (") around arguments containing a dollar sign ($).

geek65535

Thanks, that makes sense.
It looks like my best bet is to do a run against the "GPS Logger" files, and if "0 image files updated" then I'll re-run against the life360 files.