Review: Maperture

Maperture is a free geotagging plugin for Aperture, Apple’s pro-level photo management application. It allows you to click on a map (Maperture uses Google Maps) to assign geographical coordinates to your photos.

Maperture worked as advertised on two batches of photos I tried with it, in that geotags assigned in Maperture showed up properly when I subsequently uploaded the photos to Flickr. But there are a couple of areas where the plugin could be improved.

The interface does not work well with multiple photos: if you’ve already geotagged one photo, you can’t add additional photos to its pushpin; you have to select all the photos and geotag them in a single batch. Being able to drag photos onto an existing pushpin would be a considerable improvement. Maperture also adds a “Geotagged” keyword to every photo it geotags, and you can’t turn that off (which is annoying when trying to upload a photo to Flickr; in what I presume is a bug with the unrelated FlickrExport Lite plugin, the tag persists even when you try to remove it on export).

Having said that, it seems churlish for me to quibble about what is, after all, a free plugin that, notwithstanding those nuisances, is quite simple to use. I’ll continue to use it when I need to geotag photos manually.

Previously: iPhoto, Geotagging, GPS and the Mac: A Post-Macworld Roundup.

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