Photos app (Tahoe, iOS 18.6) swapping East & West coordinates for some old photos

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Photos app (Tahoe, iOS 18.6) swapping East & West coordinates for some old photos

I have a group of ~200 photos saved in iCloud that were taken in New York and the Bay Area in 2013 (iPhone 4S, iOS 6.1.13) that MacOS & ioS Photos apps are locating in Osh, Kyrgyzstan and the Yellow Sea respectively - clearly swapping East and West coordinates in Places & Memories collections.

When I view the EXIF data directly via Preview or ExifWizard, however, the GPS coordinates show the longitude correctly as West of Greenwich.

Can anyone explain (and preferably help me fix) this behaviour?

Thanks!

Posted on Oct 12, 2025 2:45 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

19,670 points

Oct 12, 2025 7:48 PM in response to jcollier001

Have you or someone else by chance used Photos .xmp sidecars to transfer metadata? Photos has a very old issue where it stores GPS coordinates to .xmp in a non-standard way. If a standard way to copy such GPS is used, western and southern coordinates are switched to east and north.

That Preview.app displays the correct longitude does not properly fit to that explanation, though. GPS data can be stored in various tags so maybe Preview gets it from some non-common tag where it happens to be correct. If possible you could check the location tags with exiftool with:

exiftool -a -G1 -s -n -Location:All image.jpg

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=12634.msg68327#msg68327

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