Protecting Positions of Photos on Map

Software darktable
1

Hello,

I realized that photos on the map change their geographic locations if accidentally dragged by the mouse. How can I lock them to protect their coordinates?

Thanks

Greetings
Chris

2

Hi Chris, welcome to pixls.us community.

I’m not sure that the locations can be locked. That’s part of the functionality of the map to enable non-geotagged images to be dragged to the appropriate location.

1 Like
3

Hello,

As said by Martin, I think you cannot at the moment AFAIK.

But I also think being able to put the map module in either a read or read+write state would be nice, as it already happened to me that I changed some pics GPS location by mistake.

GLLM

1 Like
4

Thank you both for clarifying. I think it is against my workflow then, because to me it is not a use case to place photos by hand. Either the location coordinates are in the picture or they are automatically transferred from the GPS track or other pictures nearby in time. My use case of the map would only be selecting regions and exporting pictures of that regions (all read-only operations).

5

Is there probably a better alternative to the Darktable map in a different app, that better fits my use case?

6

Quick thought. Since dt doesn’t write to raw files the original location should always be in the raw file. Presumably any move will be written only to the .xmp file.

doesn’t really prevent accidental moves though but getting the geo back should be possible. Perhaps someone knows a way to update the geo data from the raw file?

1 Like
7

I think I tried some days ago to delete the XMP files but the wrong locations were still active. I had to delete the app’s entire database file. So without writing a script that does database queries, I think there is no chance to get rid of accidentally modified locations…

Yes I think that would be an acceptable workaround for that problem. However, the app does not inform the user about manually changed positions, so the user would have to periodically re-run the update from the raw file, which is a really error-prone workflow.

For that reason I started playing around with https://leafletjs.com and https://openlayers.org, trying to embed the images on OpenStreetMap myself.

8

Thanks for these links, Chris.

One of the few remaining reasons I am tethered :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: to darktable still is the map mode functionality, which I love. I have found in vkdt the ability to achieve almost everything I do in darktable, insanely faster. Adding external mapping functionality may be the missing piece of the puzzle for me.