questions about PSU geocoding

[fbungarz]

Hi everyone,
Doing quite a bit of geo-coding recently in PSu, I find several things rather odd, but before filing Mantis bugs or feature requests I thought I'd better asks if those are by design:

(1) Adding a locality to "Favorites" does is a great way to quickly fill in these fields and add GPS coordinates for a frequently used location. Any reason why this favorites-list is NOT sorted alphabetically. With quite a few favorites one easily gets lost, not finding anything anymore... Perhaps there is a way to edit this list, even changing its sort order. As far as I can tell the list is sorted according to when items were added. This hardly makes any sense to me, but perhaps others prefer it that way?

(2) Is there a quick way to create a mapped label from any location stored in the favorites list? I previously used "apply details profile" in the properties menu of a label quite extensively to add coordinates and relevant locality data. Finding locality data using the lookup option in the Geo-panel is a very efficient way to find and fill in a lot of geo-data quickly, but the favorites quickly become cluttered. Once created I generally find assigning labels that also apply geo-data a bit more convenient and quite a lot faster...
Is there a quick way to copy the Geo-Panel favorites into the "apply details profile" of a particular label?

(3) With the geo-panel open, when I want to place a marker for a selected photo ,I need to right-click TWO times. Upon the first right-click a large menu opens that to me does not appear to have anything to do with geo-coding. In fact to me it looks like a right-click menu that would show up for a web-page (back, forward, save background as, ... encoding ... properties).
In any case - the "Set Marker here" and "Search" only show up, when I right-click a second time. Is this by design??? It seems definitely quite odd...
[Perhaps it cannot be avoided because the geo-panel is essentially showing the Google maps website? And the first right-click is calling the web browser default?]

(4) I though it was possible to drag a photo onto the map in the GPS-Panel, but either I am mistaken and that never worked or it is no longer working?

(5) Selecting several photos with different coordinates using right-click they "displayed on map" their minute thumbs are all shown scattered across the map. On the GPS-Panel map only the green set-marker is shown and only for a single image selected. Selecting several images with coordinates no markers are shown. Is this by design?

(6) Minor thing, but odd: Using the lookup-button searching for a location the panel automatically fills in the country codes only for some countries. For example, it finds "ECU" for Ecuador, but not "DEU" for Germany...

Thanks for clarifying.
Other than that the Geo-Panel works really great! A HUGE improvement to the one in IDI version 5.

Cheers,
Frank

[Stephen]

>>>6) Minor thing, but odd: Using the lookup-button searching for a location the panel automatically fills in the country codes only for some countries. For example, it finds "ECU" for Ecuador, but not "DEU" for Germany...

Maybe, GER is the code for Germany? I haven't tried though.

[Mke]

Well I can help with one:

(3) The need to double click is apparently due Google - http://mantis.idimager.com/view.php?id=3057

[fbungarz]

Maybe, GER is the code for Germany? I haven't tried though.

Not sure, but then the Panel should fill in GER instead, shouldn't it?
My point: on my PC, if I do a search, PSu fills in ECU for Ecuador, if the place is located in Ecuador, but the field actually remains completely empty if a place in Germany is returned....


On a related note:
Where can I find the standard list of these codes? I remember, when I first tried out this field, PSu told me it would download the list. "DEU" indeed seems a bit odd for Germany. I only know these codes from those stickers you can place on your car, or the abbreviations printed on your European license plates. Those are mostly two letter codes, e.g., DK for Denmark, GB for Great Britain, etc. And the one for Germany is actually "D", not "DEU", and not "GER"...
So, where do these codes come from anyway?

Thanks,
Frank

[fbungarz]

Hi Mke - thanks for pointing out the Mantis ticket, which confirms that this is a bug caused by Google's API.

[sanphotgn]

IPTC description of the field:

https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/ ... ection.htm

ISO country codes information:

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes.htm

The above ISO link includes a link to their online browsing platform to view and search for the codes.

[Stephen]

Frank,
Here is a selection for you to try, found on Wikipedia under "country codes". Maybe more than you wanted though

[fbungarz]

Hmmm, thanks for those references.
So, it appears to be that the standard should be ISO 3166, which for Germany means the correct code is "DEU".
Unfortunately all this doesn't leave me any wiser, why PSu doesn't not auto-fill of these codes for some countries (like Germany), while it does auto-fill the field for others (like Ecuador).
Hert - any suggestions, why PSu works this way? If a place is located in Ecuador, the field gets filled automatically with ECU, if a place is in Germany, the field remains empty...

[Hert]

Psu asks Google maps what the location details are for a set of coordinates. What Google returns is what you see.

[fbungarz]

Thanks for the clarification, so this must be a Google bug, strange...

[Hert]

BTW; I see the same here

[fbungarz]

Is there any way to report this to Google? Also about the API integration?
These are both GoogleMaps bugs then: right-click interference if GoogleMaps" is integrated in the panel and country codes not consistently being returned...

It must be frustrating for you to be dependent on them and they, being such a giant, probably won't listen. But perhaps it is worth a try? After all Zenfolio listened and DxO also fixed its software (after I have been bugging them for about a year)... And yes, I know, PhaseOne keeps being "beratungsresistent", but still perhaps worth a try with Google...

Any ideas, how to complain directly to them?

[Hert]

Frank, I've debugged this and it's not a google issue but a geonames issue, after PSU gets the data from Google, it enriches the data with geonames details. Their service is currently down which is why PSU can't generate a iso country code.

[fbungarz]

Thanks for clarifying.
BTW - it seems geocoding, unlike labeling, applies only to the selected image out of a version set. Is that by design? I would think images that belong to the same version set would all be from the same locality, or not?

[Hert]

Ok, I found out that they've changed their URL again. As this happened before PSU is prepared for a workaround;

Run this script:
<edit Hert; removed the script because as of build 2570 it's no longer valid>

Then restart PSU and you should get countrycodes again.
Does that help?