GPS co ordinates embedded

Homer

Hopefully someone might be able to answer my query! If I upload images to the likes of pix.ie or similar hosting site and embed the photos to a thread in boards.ie with the gps co ordinates embedded, how accurate are the gps co ordinates? I presume it's generally accurate to within "x" metres and somebody would not be able to accurately locate the exact premises they were taken?

Rew

Anywhere from 10 cm to to a few km, assuming its taken with a phone it may be using a number of things to get the location depending on how good the fix it gets the accuracy varies widely. Generally it will be to within 50 mets id say.

Kenny Logins

Sometimes with a phone the actual GPS antenna may not be enabled and it will then use the phone masts to give a rough location, which can be way off.

Homer

It was on a dslr that has gps tagging built into the camera if that makes any difference.

cnocbui

Given the accuracy of the GPS in my phone, i would say someone could most definitely locate a property from embedded coordinates.

Gregor Samsa

Here's some free windows software that claims to let you view and edit location info embedded in the EXIF info of a variety of image formats

http://www.geosetter.de/en/

I haven't used it myself, so I don't know how good it is.

On the Mac, both iPhoto and Aperture let you strip out GPS info from exported pictures, while keeping the rest of the EXIF info. Lightroom may do the same, I'm not sure. If you have Photoshop, you can edit the metadata there too.

GPS data on a camera could be very accurate, but I've had photos taken on my iPhone in Spain that showed up in the middle of the Pacific on the map in Aperture. Other pics are accurate to at least a few metres.

pete4130

It depends on the type of GPS its using. If its satellite based GPS on a camera then some cameras like the Olympus Tough GPS has to be manually updated in between each shot to get new long/lat. If you don't update then it will be the last co-ords used. You also have the option (or should do) to turn it off.

GPS doesn't work if you're inside either. It needs line of site. You might have some line of sight through a window but probably not enough satellite coverage or good geometry of satellites to give a good fix on your position. There are also good times of the day and bad times of the day with regards to coverage.

Also, in built up areas/tall buildings you get signal multipath where the signal gets bounced around and you get inaccurate fixes on your position.

If its a camera, and not a phone you shouldn't have to worry about mobile phone antenna triangulation.

haz

The open source utility exiftool will read and write exif tags including GPS location. The following script is designed show the GPS data, erase it and show the tags after erasing - it is for photos on EBay and works on Linux or Mac. The exiftool command runs on Windows also http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/index.html

for file in "$@" ; do
  exiftool -a -G1 $file
  exiftool -gps:all= $file
  exiftool -a -G1 $file
  read -p "Press return to continue"
done