Geotag Information when transfering photos

Hi Rich,
Thanks for posting your question here. When transferring photos from iPhone to computer all the metadata is retained, the photo is transfered exactly as it is on the iPhone so all EXIF headers will be preserved.

However, as you noticed, when transferring from computer to iPhone the information is unfortunately lost. The reason for this is that we need to use a programming interface that Apple provides to save photos to the native 'Photos' app. This programming interface only reads the bytes of the image but it discards the header information unfortunately!

This has been a source of frustration for us and for many other developers working with photos on iPhone and iPad :( The good news is that Apple seems to have fixed this issue in the new release of the SDK so hopefully soon we'll be able to have an update with a solution for this problem (when they release the next update to the iPhone OS).

I'm sorry I didn't have a better answer. I will post something here as soon as we have a fix for this with the new OS.

Kind regards,

The Photo Transfer App team

Hi Enrique,

i have to say that is some amazing customer support, very quick response, unlike some software developers. That makes sense, i narrowed it down to this particular problem shortly after my self as i sync the photo's with itunes and the GEOTag information stayed intact. TBH i can't wait for the update.

I was wondering if there was anyway of moving the files from a folder under photo's to the camera roll? this would get me round the slight issue at the moment, i just can't seem to find which folder the jog's need to be in on SSH.

Hi Rich,
Thanks for your comments. I'm not 100% sure of what you mean by "moving the files from a folder to the camera roll"? You mean organize photos inside of the 'Photos' app? If that's what you mean currently I don't think the 'Photos' app allows you to organize the photos using your iPhone. That would need to be done on the computer and then after re-organizing you would need to sync your device again.

Are you connecting to the iPhone from an SSH session? Is your iPhone jailbroken? I don't have much experience on connecting over SSH to make changes on the phone so I can't really suggest anything regarding this. I know that photos were stored in '/User/Media/DCIM/100APPLE' at some point but not sure if this has changed.

We use the API's provided by Apple and we are not allowed to touch the photo files directly from an app so that's why I don't know the exact place were to place the files. Also, I believe the 'Photos' app keeps an internal catalog so if you add the files you may need to re-build the catalog so the photos show up on the app.

Hope this helps. We'll let you know when we fix the issue with the EXIF data as soon as 4.1 is released.

Regards,

Enrique
Photo Transfer App

Enrique, know this is a year later but am curious of the status of above transfers, and fixes - both with your product and ios5 , Can the photo transfer app now successfuly transfer exif geo tag information from a photo on a windows pc to the photo app on an iPad ? If so I will be back to buy your product quickly. Please advise to my email as well - gschof@shaw.ca - as I may not find my way back to this thread

I just sent you an email to answer your question :)

Fantastic support, thank you very much; downloaded your product and it transfers photos from my PC to my iPad ios5.1 flawlessly including the EXIF headers and the geotags. Looking at my pictures ( taken with a DSLR camera and externally geotagged on my PC with Geosetter ) from Cartagena in 'places' in the iPad photo app right now. It does what Photostream and WebAlbums doesn't.
Thanks again and I highly recommend your product to all and am reposting this reply back to the help chain in case others google upon it as I did