Aperture Bug Means That You Can’t Strip Location Data From Individual Pics

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aperture

Modern cameras include GPS data in photos, and software like iPhoto and Aperture uses this data to provide location info for features like Places. Not only are many people unaware that GPS data is included in the pics they’re taking, but uploading these pics online means that the world knows exactly when and where they were taken.

Apple’s professional photo Mac software, Aperture, is supposed to let you strip location data from your pics before you share them from the app. The problem is that the feature doesn’t exactly work in the current version of Aperture.

Aperture allows you to see where you’ve taken photos on a handy map.

David Chartier shares his personal experience on his blog:

I plugged my Photo Stream into Aperture a while ago, so I figured it would be a good place to start. Unfortunately, whether it’s an intentional behavior or a bug, the Metadata > Remove Locations command in Aperture does not actually remove GPS data from photos you downloaded through Photo Stream.

John Morrison, a photographer friend, helped me test this and, as we were kicking around theories, posited that maybe Aperture does this because of the way it stores metadata separately and, in general, most of that information is actually untouchable.

But I think the fact Aperture can edit a photo’s actual timestamp rules that out, so I think it’s a bug. It’s a troublesome bug, too, if you’re looking to scrub private locations when exporting your photos for sharing anywhere besides Aperture’s limited selection of non-Photo Stream services, which includes only Facebook and Flickr.

You can see Chartier’s step-by-step instructions for replicating the bug if you’re interested. For what it’s worth, you can still strip all location data from your Aperture library by unchecking “Include location info in exported photos” in the Export section of Preferences. So you can remove GPS data from all of your photos, but not individual pics you want to share online. Hopefully Apple fixes this soon.

Source: Finer Things in Tech

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