reverse geonames lookup

[snowman1]

In another thread I mentioned the following:

I did notice ... that one of my recent images actually gave no information other than state (England) and country (UK) when I did the reverse lookup - this seemed really strange. It didn't even fill in the country code. I tried the operation with other images from the same device (a mobile phone) and they were ok, filling in all the fields I'd expect. I found this very odd and I can only put it down to a deficiency in the lookup database.

I have now noticed that another image also gives far more detail when looked up with the Geosetter application than it does with PSU. Screenshots are given below.

The "city" level (it's actually a countryside area in this case) provided by Geosetter - "Tissington and Lea Hall" - represents a much smaller area than that provided by PSU - "Derbyshire Dales District" - which covers a very wide area.

For the "location" field (or "sublocation" as Geosetter calls it) PSU does not make any entry at all. Geosetter gives an area - "Tissington" - that corresponds roughly to a village.

To me, the information provided by Geosetter seems far more useful. I notice that Geosetter uses http://api.geonames.org. What does PSU use? And is there any option to change it? I am minded to put in a Mantis request.

Here is the info as set by geosetter:

Clipboard001.jpg (146.87 KiB) Viewed 2780 times

Here is how this appears when this metadata is loaded back into PSU:

Clipboard002.jpg (69.08 KiB) Viewed 2780 times

And here is what PSU does when it does a reverse lookup itself:

Clipboard003.jpg (68.07 KiB) Viewed 2780 times

[Mke]

Intersting. It seems that GeoNames relies significantly on public data (http://www.geonames.org/data-sources.html), so for countries that publish good quality data I guess it does a good job, but maybe not so good elsewhere; there's an interesting (but not necessarily very enlightening) comparison at http://www.geonames.org/statistics/

PSU uses Google, BTW. There are various other services around too, but no doubt they come with various issues surrounding practicality and affordability.