Can exiftool look up missing altitude?

[outdoormagic]

Hello from Boston,

I'm sure the answer is "yes," so the question is really: "how do I do it?"

I have pictures that have "2D" data, but are missing elevation. They were likely tagged by dragging on them onto a map, not with a GPS tack log. I can use apps to look up altitudes (won't mention by name as I don't know if it is ok to do so), but they can't tag pictures very near shorelines—most likely due to the resolution of the database used.

Is there a way exiftool can find files with latitude and longitude but without elevation (I think I can do that part), but then look up the elevation from (??somewhere??) and update the file accordingly?

Thank you and Happy New Year!

[StarGeek]

In theory, yes, but not without some work.

You would need some source data, most likely some online system.  Then you would have to write some perl code to tell exiftool how to do so.  And depending upon how you did it, you might have to use Perl to run it instead of the Windows executable (if you're on Windows).

If you're on Windows, though, you might look into Geosetter.  Currently, there's a problem with it because Google started charging for it's API services and the author can't afford to cover those costs.  But there is a workaround if you get your own Google API keys.  See this post for a PDF with the details.

Given a GPS coordinate, Geosetter can look up altitude as well as other items, like city, state, and time zones.  And it uses ExifTool on the back end to write the data.