Surely there’s simple inexpensive software dedicated to manipulating metadata and GPS information which would do this better than DxO PhotoLab? This seems utility territory and not a core RAW development feature.
Free alternative: GeoTag. Based on very reliable open source EXIFtool.
Free alternative: GPSPhotoLinker
Paid alternative (promising): PhotoLinker
Paid alternative (less promising): HoudahGeo
Writing GPS data directly into RAW files and risking making them incompatible or corrupting seems like a significant support load for PhotoLab to take on for very little gain. I’d hate to see DxO lose hundreds of man hours on a feature which does nothing to advance its USP (superior RAW development within an attractive, efficient and uncomplicated interface).
Regarding the question about a Mac app, I use HoudahGeo when I need to geocode images outside Lightroom. It’s worth reading the user guide to understand the Ui and all the features that are available.
In a higher price category ($139) there’s PhotoMechanic which truly has very powerful IPTC and data manipulation capabilities. Here’s the documentation for PhotoMechanic’s GPS features. CameraBits have been building an ingestion/rating/metadata editing system for more than fifteen years now. If DxO were to get really serious about an ingestion/IPTC module for PhotoLab, it would probably function something like PhotoMechanic (but visually better designed). Adding this much functionality without damaging RAW files and making them fail to open in some programs was a ten year project. Emulating and troubleshooting it would be a three to five year project depending on the quality of your team and man hours available (the DxO team is very good).
FastRawViewer is more than enough for me but I’ve got the trial running for PhotoMechanic 6 now and it works pretty well and doesn’t look nearly as clunky as PhotoMechanic 5.
Great suggestion Scottin. NeoFinder is a very serious piece of Mac software with fifteen years of continuous development behind it. I don’t use the geotagging features of NeoFinder but I do use it to manage my own archives and have never found it lacking or unreliable.
Does Neofinder also support geo tagging? On the website they refer to 3rd software for this.
Personally I use GeoTagster. It is super easy and fast for using GPX tracks for Geo tagging. And it is cheap. It doesn’t support reverse geo coding or manual tagging, though. For this I use just Apple Photos.
Most of the solutions I dug up include automated import and matching of GPS logs, Christian. There’s probably a few formats of these logs – I’m not sure which ones support GPX. Please let the community know what you find.
ExifTool supports GPX, NMEA RMC/GGA/GLL, KML, IGC, Garmin XML and TCX, Magellan PMGNTRK, Honeywell PTNTHPR, Winplus Beacon text, and Bramor gEO log files, so any app that leverages it should support all of them.
It is a simple one liner for a file or an entire directory of files:
Just make sure your camera clock and the GPX device have the same date/time set. ExifTool (and other programs) can handle this issue, but it may require additional steps. Easier if they’re in sync to begin with.