Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2019/11/19/places-please-geolocation-in-apples-photos/
You are on a tour bus in an unfamiliar city and you see something that you’d like to visit later. Take a picture of it with your iPhone, and the Places feature in the Camera app can locate it for you. With an additional app, you can get directions to get back there!
On my iPhone running 13.2.3, the address of the photo is listed just beneath the map of the location of the photo in Photos.Tapping on that address opens it right up in Maps. I don’t have to use any extensions or tap the sharing icon at all. Just scroll the picture in Photos up, see the map, tap the address. Is this a new addition to Photos to make going back to the geolocation easier than it used to be?
Oh grumble, that might indeed be new. In fairness to Donald, he wrote this piece a while back, focusing on iOS 12 and then had to revise it for iOS 13. So it’s possible that that feature did indeed just appear in one of the versions of iOS 13 since the article was revised.
I wonder if that is rolling in along with the new Maps data. I don’t think I saw actual addresses until recently.
I’ve been using Metapho for a few years now, and highly recommend it. Really thoughtfully designed software, and useful for a host of reasons. So even if you can go straight to Maps from a photo now, it might still be worth giving Metapho a try. 
1 Like
Don and I have updated the article to remove the Metapho instructions—not because there’s anything wrong with Metapho, but because Photos now makes this particular task much easier to do internally.
I watched the finale of MindHunter the other night. The season was set in Atlanta but I recognized an old Bell Telephone building from Pittsburgh. I remember making a short video of a detail on an outside wall. Apple Photos had tagged it with the exact address and I was able to find it in Google Street View. Very cool.
1 Like
At first I thought that Adam Engst was written the article, but when I read Donald O’Shea it sent me back about 30 years ago in a SPIE conference…
I often use the described feature, mostly to find out where I was in China, but sometimes the geotag is about 100 meters away from the actual place !
I can confirm that Google Maps and Apple Maps show different locations in China. Not sure why that is but I noticed that there were 50-100 m differences 3 years ago – 50 m is often enough to put you on a parallel street! Unfortunately I forgot which one was correct but it seems Apple Maps was/is wrong. Maybe a specific problem with Chinese maps? Not sure if this has been fixed though.
I am still using iOS 12 and wonder if Mapple Maps stores maps for offline use in OS 13. The fact that it still doesn’t (appear to) do that in iOS 12 is a killer and a reason why I hardly ever use Apple Maps.
Maybe not an issue if you have a local data plan but often in foreign countries I don’t.
If the Chinese maps were off by 100 meters, might it be that this is a Chinese security feature rather than poor cartography,
I would highly recommend you download the Maps.me app. It’s extremely useful, not just for offline maps, but because the OpenStreetMaps it is based on often have far more detail of walking and cycle paths than Google or Apple maps.