HoudahGeo 5.0
Houdah Software has released HoudahGeo 5.0, a photo geotagging app that works with Apple’s Photos, iPhoto, and Aperture, along with Adobe’s Lightroom. HoudahGeo writes GPS location coordinates and names to EXIF, XMP and IPTC tags in JPEG and raw files, enabling photo cataloging tools to organize and later find photos by location. This major new release adds the capability to assign photos to favorite places and apply coordinates and location names, enables drag-and-drop geocoding and reverse geocoding (via location name lookup), adds a new keywords editor for assigning keywords in bulk, improves support for Google Earth KML export, and improves metadata integration with Lightroom’s
catalog. If you own a license for HoudahGeo 4, you can upgrade to version 5 for $19 (and licenses purchased on or after 1 December 2015 are eligible for a free upgrade). ($39 new, free update, 21.7 MB, release notes, 10.10+)
I'm not sure what "works with" means, but HoudahGeo doesn't "work with" Photos in any meaningful way other than that both work with images.
With Lightroom, Aperture, iPhoto it can actually browse their catalog/libraries. It can't do that with Photos (an Apple thing; not due to any problem with HoudahGeo). If you reference images in Photos it can find them as regular folders and geotag them. All this is just down to the lame nature of Photos, but if you tag the images BEFORE importing to Photos it works a charm.
Right! The key with HoudahGeo is that you can at least get geotags into the photos before Photos sees them, after which Photos will be able to read those added geotags.
HoudahGeo can browse the Photos library. If you don’t see the Photos library in HoudahGeo: go to Preferences in Photos and click “Use as System Photo Library”.
HoudahGeo can use edited images from the Photo library for publishing: e.g. create a Google Earth KML file that allows for viewing photos in “balloons” placed along the track you travelled.
HoudahGeo can also access and geotag original images files in the Photos catalog. Tags will be written to the actual image files, but Photos _will not_ pick up the changes. iPhoto and Aperture allowed HoudahGeo to notify them of changes to location information. The current version of Photos still lacks that ability.
Thus the recommended workflow is to tag images before importing them into Photos. The easiest way to do so is to use HoudahGeo to download the images from the camera / memory card.
I see that geotagging prior to importing is best, but is there a way to use HoudahGeo to add geotags to images that are ALREADY in the Photos library?
Since posting my previous comment, I found this thread on HoudahGeo's forums which addresses this question.
http://forums.houdah.com/post/photos-extension-for-photos-in-el-capitan-7748392?highlight=photosbr />
The Houdah moderator says to tag the originals and create copies then import these into Photos, but that you'll lose your edits you made in Photos. Not good.
Anybody know of a way to avoid this problem? I don't want to lose my edits, and I don't want to create dupes, and I DO want to add geolocation info to many pictures.