IPTC Sublocation field for areas within a big city ?

[swteven]

Location is an important descriptor for my photos. Many of my photos are taken in a large city (Houston) and I need to identify smaller areas or neighborhoods within the city. As I examine the IPTC location panel I noticed the Sublocation field. Would this be the correct field for this?


Many of my subjects are buildings with street addresses. What field is be best for that?

 

[johnbeardy]

To me sublocation would be correct both on a technical (see guideline below) and more importantly on a practical level.

The four level IPTC location fields are a bit of a kludge. Some places are well represented by 4 layers, but many others aren't. So for instance, you are faced by USA / Texas / Houston / ... and then what? It's a big enough city that you might want a borough or Downtown, maybe a level or two below that. Or think of a desert area - what's the City for somewhere in the middle of nowhere?

So I think practical considerations should take priority. How do we need to slice and dice our photos? And how do we best take advantage of the tools? While we could build a more useful location hierarchy with keywords, keywords can often be too flexible - it's easy to put images of the same place in more than one keyword tree. But the 4 IPTC fields force you to make a decision and are much easier to drill down into via the Library Filter.

You also have the GPS location, of course.

John

From the IPTC guidelines sublocation:
"Enter the name of the location shown in the image. This sublocation name could be the name of a specific area within a city (Manhattan) or the name of a well-known location (Pyramids of Giza) or (natural) monument outside a city (Grand Canyon). Sublocation is the most specific term, at the fourth level of a top-down geographical hierarchy if it is inside a city or at the third level if outside a city."

 

[clee01l]

Scott, I have found a GPS unit invaluable. Not only do you get precise coordinates, LR will fill in the Location components down to the subdivision level in the sublimation field. However, here is Scotland, LR has let me down in that the location field are empty.

 

[swteven]

I have many photos of Houston buildings in my archive that I have photographed from multiple angles. I suppose the Direction field could describe that. And, I have aerial photographs of the city from different Altitudes which also has its own field. IPTC is really very thorough.

John - in a similar forum post you indicated that some web publishing apps may not parse or use location fields. At some point I plan to publish my photos to various web publishing apps like Flickr, Facebook, etc. In this case, I might also want to duplicate the tags in the Keywords or the Title and Caption fields ?


Cletus - I will have to experiment with GPS and the LR map function. I actually just went to the map, zoomed in on Houston and dragged a photo to particular point. At that point LR added the coordinates to the IPTC location panel. Very nice!

 

[Jim Wilde]

LR has let me down in that the location field are empty.

Really, Cletus? That's most odd....have you checked that Address Lookup isn't Paused (in the Activity Centre)? Assuming that's not the case, if you want to upload one of your images into Dropbox, I'll happily have a play to see if I can figure what's happened.

 

[Jim Wilde]

At that point LR added the coordinates to the IPTC location panel. Very nice!

If you also have the Address Lookup option enabled, Lightroom will also automatically fill in as much of the Location data as it can.

 

[johnbeardy]

John - in a similar forum post you indicated that some web publishing apps may not parse or use location fields. At some point I plan to publish my photos to various web publishing apps like Flickr, Facebook, etc. In this case, I might also want to duplicate the tags in the Keywords or the Title and Caption fields ?

And that's still true - and will remain so. Within LR the four IPTC fields are very useful indeed - in the Library Filter and Smart Collections. Online, they're rarely read by publishing apps, whereas keywords, title and caption are. So duplication is almost inevitable.

I am far less enthusiastic about how Lr autocompletes the location fields from GPS. It's a bit brainless, often using local authority administrative names rather than what one actually calls an area. Secondly, more seriously, you can't use these computed locations in smart collections. Also, I use my Search Replace plugin to automatically copy the IPTC locations to keywords, and one can't detect the computed locations. So I prefer to assign the locations myself, and having all four fields as columns in the Library Filter makes this pretty easy.

John

 

[swteven]

Great Information Ya'll (Thats Texan for "you guys") :mrgreen:

Jim - I have both Reverse Geocoding options checked in Catalog Settings. I drag an image right onto a zoomed-in location in the Map Module. I can't get LR to provide an address. Where is the address supposed to appear? Is there something else I need to know ?

 

[clee01l]

Really, Cletus? That's most odd....have you checked that Address Lookup isn't Paused (in the Activity Centre)? Assuming that's not the case, if you want to upload one of your images into Dropbox, I'll happily have a play to see if I can figure what's happened.

Address lookup is active as is the checkbox in catalog settings. I haven't taken notice of the location fields until Scott's post. And I can't say if I have noticed if it was working since I updated to LRCC. I know it was working in LR5. I have none of my Texas images with me to see if the fields are populated properly.
Photo

Correction: The problem is the Darker gray text on a dark gray background. For me and my eyes this is nearly impossible to read on a retina screen. There appears to be no way to change this in Preferences.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Jim - I have both Reverse Geocoding options checked in Catalog Settings. I drag an image right onto a zoomed-in location in the Map Module. I can't get LR to provide an address. Where is the address supposed to appear? Is there something else I need to know ?

Where are you looking? And expecting an "address" (in the sense of a street and building name/number) is expecting too much, the best you can usually get is an "area". The data should appear in the panel to the right of the map, see this screenshot:

Note a couple of things:

1. In this particular example, there is no sublocation automatically entered, which means that Google Maps couldn't provide one.

2. As Cletus noted, the 4 other fields that have been entered are quite faint in comparison to the GPS co-ordinates just below. That's because at this stage they are "suggestions", and it's down to the user to "confirm" (or change) them. You do this by clicking on the appropriate label, e.g. City, and then clicking on the suggestion that appears. In this particular example, I've done that and also entered a sublocation, and now all appear as normal text:

 

[Jim Wilde]

Secondly, more seriously, you can't use these computed locations in smart collections.

John, could you expand on this as I'm not following. In the example from my previous post, a smart collection correctly includes the picture if it's set appropriately, e.g. Sublocation>Contains>Park, or City>Contains>Burgess. Are you meaning something different?

 

[clee01l]

As Cletus noted, the 4 other fields that have been entered are quite faint in comparison to the GPS co-ordinates just below. That's because at this stage they are "suggestions", and it's down to the user to "confirm" (or change) them. You do this by clicking on the appropriate label, e.g. City, and then clicking on the suggestion that appears.

I guess I have never confirmed a single location As they are always mostly accurate, I did not "confirm" any. As a consequence, I have ~30,000 unconfirmed images in my master catalog and on this trip I have accumulated ~3400 images. There seems to be no means of "confirming" except by individual image one at a time. There is no batch confirm! This is short-sited to say the least on the part of Adobe. Unless, there is some batch "confirm" process that I have overlooked, it looks like I need to put in a feature request with Adobe.

 

[Jim Wilde]

I think you'll already find a feature request over there, Cletus! But note that even unconfirmed location data will still be included on export (assuming "Remove Location Info" is unchecked) if the appropriate option is checked in the Address Lookup section of the Catalog Settings>Metadata tab.

Best you can do is use Sync Metadata (or work in Grid View for groups of selected images with the same location info). Or setup some Metadata Presets for locations that you've used often. It's nowhere near ideal, but can be quicker than it sounds.

 

[johnbeardy]

I guess I have never confirmed a single location As they are always mostly accurate, I did not "confirm" any. As a consequence, I have ~30,000 unconfirmed images in my master catalog and on this trip I have accumulated ~3400 images. There seems to be no means of "confirming" except by individual image one at a time. There is no batch confirm! This is short-sited to say the least on the part of Adobe. Unless, there is some batch "confirm" process that I have overlooked, it looks like I need to put in a feature request with Adobe.

It was short-sighted, and I've whined and whinged....

But you can now (since 5, I think) use the recent entries feature where the 10 most recent entries are listed when you click the field's label in the Metadata panel. For geotagged images, the calculated country/state/city/location is added at the top of the list.

It's easiest if you use this in conjunction with the Library Filter which lets you isolate groups of pics with the same entries. A filter preset of GPS/country/state/city/location can be helpful too.

John

 

[clee01l]

It was short-sighted, and I've whined and whinged....

Can you point me to a feature request at the Adobe forum where I can add my input?

 

[johnbeardy]

I've gone via other channels, Cletus, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a feature request there.

 

[swteven]

I am running Lightroom 5.2. I found that when I drag multiple photos to a location in the Map Module, LR will add (in gray text) the City, State, Country, ISO Country Code and GPS coordinates based on the Google data. To confirm these tags (and change them to white text) I must select each individual item. I have to do this for EACH photo that was dragged to the location in the Map Module. Rather tedious !


I also noticed that if I had manually tagged these fields previously, LR would not modify the fields.


I was hoping that LR would add an actual street address but that does not seem possible.

 

[clee01l]

I am running Lightroom 5.2. I found that when I drag multiple photos to a location in the Map Module, LR will add (in gray text) the City, State, Country, ISO Country Code and GPS coordinates based on the Google data. To confirm these tags (and change them to white text) I must select each individual item. I have to do this for EACH photo that was dragged to the location in the Map Module. Rather tedious !

This was the problem that I was discussing with John yesterday.

I was hoping that LR would add an actual street address but that does not seem possible.

I'm not sure where Google gets its street addresses, perhaps associated with Google Street view which is not a part of the Google mapping used by LR. Google gets its street addresses mostly wrong anyway, so you probably would not be happy with them if LR somehow managed to use them. FWIW, a street address does not fit the IPTC definition of sublocation.

 

[swteven]

Cletus - Having re-read your earlier post I see that you addressed this.

Looks like the Map Module is marginally useful to me at this point, perhaps with some workarounds already mentioned.

 

[PhilBurton]

I am running Lightroom 5.2. I found that when I drag multiple photos to a location in the Map Module, LR will add (in gray text) the City, State, Country, ISO Country Code and GPS coordinates based on the Google data. To confirm these tags (and change them to white text) I must select each individual item. I have to do this for EACH photo that was dragged to the location in the Map Module. Rather tedious !


I also noticed that if I had manually tagged these fields previously, LR would not modify the fields.


I was hoping that LR would add an actual street address but that does not seem possible.

I know this is an old thread, but I was hoping that has been progress in this area. I do a lot of urban/suburban photography, where the street address would be very useful. If not the street address, then a "neighborhood" or landmark. Obviously I can and have entered sublocation values by hand, but that is incredibly tedious.

Any suggestions?