Import GPS Coordinates

Thanks for the positive MLA feedback. I know getting started with MLA can be complex and I appreciate the effort you’ve put in so far.

The screen shots of your GPS rules are helpful. The IPTC fields you are using are not GPS values. The 2#026 Content Location Code contains an ISO 3166 country code, and the 2#027 Content Location Name contains the full name of the country/geographical location.

GPS values are usually contained in the EXIF metadata. You can find more information about this in the “Field-level enhanced EXIF GPS values” section of the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab, which also has links to the relevant Wikipedia and standards documentation.

I do not have a copy of Lightroom, which is a premium product. I hope you understand that I cannot afford to purchase software products simply to support my own free plugin. I would expect, though, that it stores GPS information in the standard places.

You can see what metadata MLA is able to access from the Media/Edit Media screen for the item. Scroll down to the “Attachment File Metadata” text area towards the bottom of the screen. If you can’t find what you need, post a link to one or more of your images and I will investigate further.

Regarding the WordPress standard fields like Title, ALT Text, Caption and Description, I don’t know if there is a common approach used by Lightroom users. I will ask a couple of the MLA users that have Lightroom and see what they say.

By the way, if you haven’t found it yet I can recommend this great plugin for Lightroom users:

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All of Jordy Meow’s plugins are worth a look.

I hope the above information is helpful. I will leave this topic unresolved for now and post an update if I learn more about where Lightroom users store common image fields. Thanks for your interest in MLA.

Hi @hebhansen and @dglingren

I’m chiming in as a Lighroom & MLA user. ??

As far as I can see, those IPTC fields won’t work for GPS coordinates. Coordinates are stored in the EXIF metadata, not IPTC. The IPTC location/city/state/country field would contain the “translated” real-names for the coordinates that Lightroom Classic would fill automatically (from the Google Maps API) when the “look up” setting is activated in the Catalog Settings on the Metadata tab.

I haven’t done any of this myself, but the EXIF fields to use should be GPSLatitude, GPSLatitudeRef, GPSLongitude, GPSLongitudeRef, GPSAltitude, GPSAltitudeRef.

Lightroom might not use GPSLatitudeRef and GPSLongitudeRef and instead just append those to the GPSLatitude & GPSLongitude fields:

GPSLatitude=”32,50.4192497082N“
GPSLongitude=”117,16.9293937239W“

I’m not familiar with the “Geo my WordPress” plugin. Does it add custom fields for the GPS coordinates? Then it should be easy to extract the GPS coordinates from EXIF, and have MLA put them into the custom fields for the “attachment” post type.

With regards to Title, Caption, Alt-Text, Description — I’m mapping my Lightroom caption to the WP Caption and the Alt-Text, but as far as I know, there is no field in Lightroom that would match the “Description” for attachments in WordPress. (confusingly, when you switch Lightroom Classic’s “Metadata” panel to show the “IPTC” fields, there’s a field “Description” but this is actually the “Caption”.)

I hope it helps,

Alex.

It has been two months since the last post in this topic. I assume you have found a solution for importing GPS coordinates into your items.

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have problems or further questions regarding the above suggestions.