Can't find photo GPS location from iPhone in Lightroom

[JonnyCake]

Hi,

I started the process of switching to Lightroom instead of Apple's Photos app. I'm having trouble with geolocation/finding the GPS data.

In Apple Photos, I see my photos grouped by location, with a label for each photo where it was taken. But in the Lightroom library, I don't see the GPS metadata field filled in. I'm looking in Library > Metadata > GPS

When taking the photos, I did have Location services ON and enabled for my camera.

Is the label I see in Apple Photos different from the GPS metadata field?
Is there something I need to do when exporting from Apple Photos, or when importing from Lightroom?

I'm using LR CC 2015.10, iPhone 6s runnin 10.2.1, iMac running 10.12

Thanks!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi Jonny, welcome to the forum!

You're looking in the right spot... the GPS field in the Metadata panel.

Are you importing the original photos directly into Lightroom via the Import dialog? Or exporting the photos from Photos first? Or what's your workflow?

Just as a test, select one of the problem photos and go to Metadata menu > Write Metadata to Files and then Metadata menu > Read Metadata from File and see if that pulls in the missing GPS. That might give us a clue.

 

[JonnyCake]

Hi Victoria, and thanks for having me!

I imported the photos from the iPhone to Apple Photos on my Mac, then dragged them to a folder on my hard drive, and imported them with Adobe Lightroom. Off

After describing this to you I realized that was probably my mistake. Looking in File > Export, indeed I found the option to export photos and to include the location data. Problem solved!

So by using the File > Export option it works ok. The problem was directly dragging the photo thumbnails to the Finder.

Awesome! I love Lightroom so far!!

Probably a different topic, but I thought I'd ask. I noticed the option to "Export unmodified original photo", with a checkbox for "export IPTC as XMP". Any reason why I'd want XMP files? I assume that's a personal choice whether you want Adobe Lightroom to write metadata directly to the image file versus to an XMP file?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

XMP is a header section of JPEG/PSD/TIFF/DNG files, but sidecars for proprietary raw files, where it's not safe to write back to the original files.

When it offers to export unmodified original photo, I would guess that's a OS copy of the original, without any metadata you'd edited in Photos app.

 

[JonnyCake]

Sounds good. Thanks for the help!