As GPS2Aperture Pro just went into public beta testing, it seemed like a good idea to talk about geotagging and Aperture...

Many of us geotag our images these days, adding GPS co-ordinates to the images so that we can see where the images were taken in Google Earth, Google Maps etc. or uploaded to the many GPS-aware photo sites such as flickr.

Geotagging with Aperture 1.0 was a bit tricky - basically, you had to do your geotagging with another application before importing into Aperture. Even if your images were referenced rather than buried in the Library, tagging the Master files would have no effect on what you could see in the GPS tags in Aperture.

I did manage to put together an early application that would update the GPS tags in Aperture 'manually' for individual images, but this involved direct manipulation of Aperture's database, plus editing the relevant XML files down in the bottom of the Library package so that the changes would be reflected in exported Projects and when restoring from Vaults. As you can imagine, this wasn't the most robust of approaches, and on top of that, Aperture ignored all EXIF data in the database when exporting versions - only GPS tags in the Master file would be included!

Aperture 2 added a new 'Update EXIF from Master' item to the metadata menu, opening up the possibility of geotagging images after importing them into Aperture. This gives a couple of possibilities - using referenced images and using a regular geotagging application such as HoudahGeo or GPSPhotoLinker then updating from the EXIF data from within Aperture, or using a purpose-written application to do the tagging specifically with Aperture in mind.

This last category comes down to two applications - my own GPS2Aperture Lite and Übermind's Maperture. Both of these applications are specific to Aperture - Maperture working as an Aperture editing plug-in which lets you pick locations for images via Google Maps, GPS2Aperture Lite doing much the same via Google Earth and a floating window - plus the ability to have Google Earth automatically updating in the background as you browse through tagged images in Aperture.

The logical next step for both GPS2Aperture Lite and for Maperture is to work with GPS log files from standard GPS devices, taking out the manual element of having to manually place each image on a map, enabling users to bulk-tag their images. With the pro version of GPS2Aperture going into public beta testing today, and Maperture Pro in beta testing as well, there are interesting times ahead...

Ian