Reverse Geocode GPS Altitude Accuracy Setting

Started by lnh, August 26, 2014, 09:45:09 PM

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lnh

This is a follow-on to a (next version) fixed bug...

When reverse geocoding, (using Google as a provider) it returns a value for GPS Altitude which is unrealistically accurate based on the number of digits it reports. For example, the lat/long pair of 42.319543/-70.928658 reports an altitude of 7.43764501160093 m. This is suggesting an accuracy of 1/10th of a picometer. This is obviously an artifact of some Google algorithm and getting Google to report more realistic data probably isn't that easy to affect. What's the problem with reporting more accuracy than needed? My reaction probably comes from my memory of college physics and what professors said regarding significant digits and knowing the error bounds of your data. I'd rather not input what I know is unrealistic data.

A further consequence in the current version (5.1.14) was that if you were doing a multi-file IMatch reverse geocode, sometimes several of the files would be filled with the integer only part of the altitude (7m in this case), and the rest of the files would be filled with 7.43764501160093 m. My understanding of how IMatch will address this in a future release is to show the full value of whatever the reverse geocode provider returns in the reverse geocode dialog box and you can always change it in that dialog box.

My feature suggestion is have an additional checkbox in the reverse geocode dialog box which is "apply to all files". In the example above which was a real case involving 37 files, it would be nice to change the value of 7.43764501160093 m to 7 m and apply it to all 37 files rather than have to individually edit 35 files in this case (or more realistically bulk edit it the metadata panel).

Mario

The same could be said for latitude, longitude and the other rational values used by EXIF and XMP GPS...
-- Mario
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lnh

Quote from: Mario on August 27, 2014, 08:04:52 AM
The same could be said for latitude, longitude and the other rational values used by EXIF and XMP GPS...

Very good point. Being able to change a group of lat/long/altitude data as a unit would make more sense.

cytochrome

This has been discussed previously : https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=2847.msg18511#msg18511

One solution is to use the App panel were you can format the raw gps value to display only the digits you want. I used John Zeman's "Collapsible metadata viewer", works well, looks like this:

Francis

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Mario

I currently have no plans to tinker or clip the coordinate values returned by Google, Bing or one of the other map providers. Too much can go wrong, and I have no control over these services.

But IMatch 5.3 introduces a new option for Metadata Panel where you can configure IMatch to apply the numerical formatting as configured in the Windows control panel. This new option is available when the use raw option is enabled as well. A GPS altitude of 123.456778902 will then be displayed as 123.46.
-- Mario
IMatch Developer
Forum Administrator
http://www.photools.com  -  Contact & Support - Follow me on 𝕏 - Like photools.com on Facebook