Reading Geotag data from image in php

Question

Does anyone know if there is a way to read geotag data from photos in PHP?

Thanks

Answer 1

Like everyone else has said, exif_read_data(); will do it. To go ahead and get all of the data, use these args:

exif_read_data($img, 0, true); // where $img is the path to your image

This function can only read headers from tiffs and jpegs and I'm pretty sure only jpegs may contain geotags. I've written a simple php script for use in the command line and posted it as a gist on github.

Run the script like this: php exif.php

It will echo out an array. Look for the coordinates here:

[GPS] => Array
    [GPSLatitudeRef] => N
    [GPSLatitude] => Array
        [0] => 30/1
        [1] => 1589/100
        [2] => 0/1
    [GPSLongitudeRef] => W
    [GPSLongitude] => Array
        [0] => 87/1
        [1] => 3609/100
        [2] => 0/1
    [GPSAltitudeRef] => 
    [GPSAltitude] => 18289/454
    [GPSTimeStamp] => Array
    [0] => 20/1
    [1] => 22/1
    [2] => 2065/1
    [GPSImgDirectionRef] => T
    [GPSImgDirection] => 34765/689

The Latitude and Longitude arrays contain three values: 0 is for degrees, 1 is for minutes and 2 is for seconds. If you see something like "1589/100" this is equal to 15.89. So for the GPSLongitude array, 3609/100 is equal to 36.09.

Convert the coordinates from degrees-minutes-second form to decimal form here http://www.satsig.net/degrees-minutes-seconds-calculator.htm

If the latitude is South, dont forget to make it negative. If the longitude is west, make that negative. The coodinates from the above data are: 30.26483, -87.6015