Extract better GPS coordinates from images using exiftool
Sometimes I have to extract Exif information from images, mostly the GPS coordinates. The coordinates coming raw from the images are not very helpful. Let's look at a picture I took today:

Bowl of ice cream
darktable shows the following coordinates:
latitude: N 52° 40,198'
longitude: E 013° 16,852'
elevation: 93,90 m above sea level
Now that is not very helpful, because neither OpenStreetMap nor Google recognize this format out of the box:
N 52° 40,198' E 013° 16,852'

Coordinates not working in OpenStreetMap

Coordinates not working in Google
Bummer. And I don't have the time or energy to fix that every time I need the coordinates. Luckily exiftool can output the coordinates in different formats, which is super helpful. For my use cases I choose the Degrees.MinutesSeconds format, also named "Decimal degrees", or DD. This format shows latitude and longitude geographic coordinates as decimal fractions of a degree.
exiftool -time:all -location:all -G -a -s -c "%.6f"
The explanation for the options used here:
- -G: Print group name for each tag
- -a: Allow duplicate tags to be extracted
- -s: Short output format
- -v: Print verbose messages
- -q: Quiet processing
- -c "%.6f": Set format for GPS coordinates
Using these settings, I get the following coordinates:
[Composite] GPSAltitude : 93.9 m Above Sea Level
[Composite] GPSLatitude : 52.669959 N
[Composite] GPSLongitude : 13.280862 E
[Composite] GPSPosition : 52.669959 N, 13.280862 E
Which sure enough brings me right to the ice cream place "Il Pistacchio" in Hohen Neuendorf, which I visited earlier today.

Il Pistacchio on OpenStreetMap
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