This post about hidden GPS and mapping settings in iPhoto has been making the rounds of the Mac rumour mill and the mapping blogs (AppleInsider, Ed Parsons, GPS Review, MacRumors, Ogle Earth).

My response is, cool your jets, everyone. If Apple and Google were planning to integrate iPhoto and Google Maps in a future version, it’s not likely that it would turn up in version 6.0.5; if this were to happen, it’d probably be held until iPhoto 7, which will almost certainly be announced in January. This probably means very little: as the original post points out, EXIF support has been in iPhoto for a while. My guess is that this is a dead end — the vestiges of something planned for version 6 that didn’t go anywhere. That doesn’t mean that GPS integration couldn’t come to the next iPhoto version, or that something isn’t in the works, just that you maybe shouldn’t read too much into hidden files in an application bundle. (Typically, AppleInsider segues from this to a hypothesized all-in-one handheld device and OS-level mapping. Wait and see, wait and see.)