Getting location data from Panasonic DMC-ZS7

[clyde]

I have been shooting with the Panasonic DMC-ZS7 for the past year or so. I got it specifically for the GPS metadata, which has worked out pretty well, but I was disappointed that the extra location metadata is stashed away in maker notes. I started writing a script to copy them to standard tags, but it turns out the data aren't consistent enough. Here are my results. For starters I inspected the custom location tags:

exiftool -r -ext jpg -Panasonic:Location -Panasonic:Country -Panasonic:State -Panasonic:City -Panasonic:Landmark /path/to/files

They all come up with empty values--rather than being absent--when GPS was disabled on the camera. When GPS was enabled, but missing data, some or all of the fields contain '---'. That would have to be filtered out. In most of my images Panasonic:Country is 'USA', which may be the three-letter CountryCode (this camera, sadly, has not been out of the country). That would have to be expanded to Country-PrimaryLocationName. Panasonic:State looks OK. Panasonic:City is pretty good, except it has a copy of the state when the city is unknown. Everything is upper-case, so that would have to be tweaked.

Panasonic:Location is almost always empty. Panasonic:Landmark seems like a good candidate to copy to Location and Sub-location, but it is spotty. In cities it picks up all kinds of interesting results, most of which are not what I consider the location of the image. Outside of cities it is often empty, or it will change as I move around a particular site.

I learned about some interesting nearby landmarks from reading this metadata, but it isn't consistent enough to tag batches of files. Most likely any geotagging software out there will do better. Lightroom, for example, does a great job of filling in the location hierarchy based on GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude, which Panasonic saves in the right place. That, plus my own notes, gives a better result than the maker notes.

By the way, in the "Travel Mode>Area Info Set" menu on the camera, I have the following settings. They seem to be ignored by the camera.
  Country/Region: On
  State/Prov./County: On
  City/Town: Off
  Landmark: Off

[Phil Harvey]

It would be possible to apply any filtering you want to the Panasonic location tags by creating appropriate user-defined tags in ExifTool (ignore empty values, change to mixed case, expand country code, ignore City if it is the same as State, etc...).

However, it sounds like LightRoom is probably a more reliable solution anyway, and saves you the trouble of having to create the user-defined tags.

- Phil