So here’s what I did, first I pulled the photos over from the Android device. And worse, when you export those photos from Photos the location tags are gone forever.

Without doing so you’ll find that none of your imported photos are tagged with proper location details. The exif2xmp script is just extracting some of the existing info from the image and putting it into the proper XMP format that Apple’s Photos app seems to be expecting. What we’re going to do is translate the EXIF GPS info into XMP via the exif2xmp.args file that comes with exiftool. If you find yourself importing a photo and wondering why Apple didn’t get your GPS info from the file, try this exif2xmp trick out. This post won’t go into details about the data formats we’re working with because I expect the reader in this situation really just wants to get the pictures imported, and I can totally understand that feeling. Sadly I was disappointed to find that the photos were being imported without the correct GPS information even though the GPS info was definitely in the photo metadata (confirmed via exiftools). I wanted to import the photos from my Android device to my Apple Photos collection since that’s where I like to keep my photos, all in one place. I was traveling abroad and took lots of pictures like a good tourist :-). Why the hell are my pictures from my Android device not getting correct GPS info in my Apple Photos app?!

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