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MalagLagoon

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 19, 2019
158
56
I'm running macOS Monterey. Is there a way to extract GPS coordinates from photos on macOS's Photos?
 
I'm using Apple Photos on my Mac - and wondered if it was possible to get the GPS coordinates straight out of the app itself. I take it the answer is no.
 
It’s not the best way, buts it’s the quickest. In Photo’s right click on the photo, select Edit With and click Preview.

In Preview, click on the I for the inspector in the tool bar, then select GPS to see the latitude and longitude.
 
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It’s not the best way, buts it’s the quickest. In Photo’s right click on the photo, select Edit With and click Preview.

In Preview, click on the I for the inspector in the tool bar, then select GPS to see the latitude and longitude.
Nice little hack! Thanks!
 
Maybe MetaImage can give you faster access to GPS info in Photos app.

Personally I'd use ExifTool, if I had to export EXIF GPS tags from image files.
As a starting point after installing ExifTool, try a command like this in Terminal app:
Bash:
exiftool -a -gps:all image.jpg
 
Will ditto exiftool, but might be hit and miss. Betting GPS data should be on most/all of the images, but Photos keeps some meta-data in a database, so possible that any GPS data added through Photos might not be on the image(s).

Shortcuts has ability to search for images in Photos library and then can loop through them and extract the GPS data. Basic outline:

gps.png
 
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If the GPS data in the images is extracted for Spotlight searching, then that data can be read using the 'mdls' command-line tool. See the man page: man mdls

It's quite simple to get all the Spotlight metadata for a given file. Output it to a text file, then open it and see what the name for the GPS data is. Then use that name to get just that datum for any number of files.
 
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