I’m not sure how useful this will be, but as I recently built it in another language (I plan on blogging that soon as well), I thought I’d take a stab at building it in Python. Given a folder of images, can I use Python to grab the Exif information and then using that, figure out where the photos were taken using a reverse geocoding service? Here’s what I built.
First – Get the Images
Ok, the first step is simple, just get a list of images from a directory:
INPUT = "./sources" files = os.listdir(INPUT) for file in files: print(file) Woot! I’m a Python Master!
Get the Exif info
For the next step, I knew I needed to get the Exif info. For that I used the Pillow library, which has a handy getexif() method:
img = PIL.Image.open(os.path.join(INPUT, file)) img_exif = img.getexif() However, this doesn’t return what I expected:
{296: 2, 282: 72.0, 256: 4000, 257: 3000, 34853: 754, 34665: 248, 271: 'samsung', 272: 'Galaxy S24 Ultra', 305: 'S928U1UES4AXKF', 274: 1, 306: '2025:01:06 07:35:55', 531: 1, 283: 72.0} From what I can tell, the getexif method returns only a subset of exif information, not all the possible tags that may exist. That makes some sense as different hardware/services may write ad hoc exif data.
I did some Googling and this StackOverflow answer provided an interesting hack. This code will search for the GPSInfo tag and return the numeric value:
GPSINFO_TAG = next( tag for tag, name in PIL.ExifTags.TAGS.items() if name == "GPSInfo" ) # should be 34853 You can then combine this to get the right value:
gpsinfo = img_exif.get_ifd(GPSINFO_TAG) Whew. This returns a dictionary that looks like so:
{1: 'N', 2: (47.0, 30.0, 2.952359), 3: 'E', 4: (19.0, 2.0, 42.89964), 5: 0, 6: 143.0} This is the direction and GPS info in degrees and minutes returned in a Python dictionary. To convert the values, I did this:
if len(gpsinfo): latitude = f"{gpsinfo[2][0]}°{gpsinfo[2][1]}'{gpsinfo[2][2]}" {gpsinfo[1]}" longitude = f"{gpsinfo[4][0]}°{gpsinfo[4][1]}'{gpsinfo[4][2]}" {gpsinfo[3]}" I then needed to convert the longitude and latitude to decimal. For that… I turned to AI. Yep, I cheated. But guess what, it worked? Gemini spit out this function:
def dms_to_dd(dms_str): """Converts a DMS string to decimal degrees. Args: dms_str: A string representing the angle in DMS format (e.g., "36°57'9" N", "110°4'21" W"). Returns: The angle in decimal degrees. """ parts = re.split(r'[^dw.]+', dms_str.strip()) degrees = float(parts[0]) minutes = float(parts[1]) if len(parts) > 1 else 0 seconds = float(parts[2]) if len(parts) > 2 else 0 direction = parts[3].upper() if len(parts) > 3 else 'E' # Default to East dd = degrees + minutes / 60 + seconds / 3600 if direction in ('S', 'W'): dd *= -1 return dd As I had recently did something just like this, I was able to eyeball it and confirm it made sense. I will say the comment is slightly off as the input isn’t the full address, but only one portion.
Reverse Geocoding
Now that I had a location, I needed to reverse geocode, which is basically, "Given a location, what the heck is there?" Mapbox has an excellent free API for this, so I built a quick wrapper:
def reverseGeoCode(lon, lat): res = requests.get(f"https://api.mapbox.com/search/geocode/v6/reverse?longitude={lon}&latitude={lat}&access_token={MAPBOX_KEY}") return res.json() And called it like so:
loc = reverseGeoCode(dms_to_dd(longitude), dms_to_dd(latitude)) This returns a great deal of information in GeoJSON format which I’m familiar with because of my time at HERE. In my mind, I was imagining printing results for public consumption, so while a heck of a lot of data was returned, I simply wanted a formatted address:
print(loc["features"][1]["properties"]["place_formatted"]) You can check the Mapbox docs if you want to see more of the results, but that worked just fine for me.
The Results
When I ran it, I got exactly what I expected:
20250108_101553.jpg Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- laf.jpg Lafayette, Louisiana, United States -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20250107_160104.jpg Győr, Győr-Moson-Sopron, Hungary -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20250111_170109.jpg Grein, Upper Austria, Austria -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20250112_154722.jpg Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20250106_073555.jpg Budapest, Hungary -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And if you’re curious, here is each of those images, in the same order as above. (I edited the laf.jpg one to not have my precise address. Sorry. 
The complete source code for this script will be at the end.
The Script
import os import PIL.Image import PIL.ExifTags import re import requests MAPBOX_KEY = os.environ.get('MAPBOX_KEY') def reverseGeoCode(lon, lat): res = requests.get(f"https://api.mapbox.com/search/geocode/v6/reverse?longitude={lon}&latitude={lat}&access_token={MAPBOX_KEY}") return res.json() def dms_to_dd(dms_str): """Converts a DMS string to decimal degrees. Args: dms_str: A string representing the angle in DMS format (e.g., "36°57'9" N", "110°4'21" W"). Returns: The angle in decimal degrees. """ parts = re.split(r'[^dw.]+', dms_str.strip()) degrees = float(parts[0]) minutes = float(parts[1]) if len(parts) > 1 else 0 seconds = float(parts[2]) if len(parts) > 2 else 0 direction = parts[3].upper() if len(parts) > 3 else 'E' # Default to East dd = degrees + minutes / 60 + seconds / 3600 if direction in ('S', 'W'): dd *= -1 return dd # Credit: https://stackoverflow.com/a/73745613/52160 GPSINFO_TAG = next( tag for tag, name in PIL.ExifTags.TAGS.items() if name == "GPSInfo" ) # should be 34853 INPUT = "./sources" files = os.listdir(INPUT) for file in files: print(file) img = PIL.Image.open(os.path.join(INPUT, file)) img_exif = img.getexif() gpsinfo = img_exif.get_ifd(GPSINFO_TAG) if len(gpsinfo): latitude = f"{gpsinfo[2][0]}°{gpsinfo[2][1]}'{gpsinfo[2][2]}" {gpsinfo[1]}" longitude = f"{gpsinfo[4][0]}°{gpsinfo[4][1]}'{gpsinfo[4][2]}" {gpsinfo[3]}" loc = reverseGeoCode(dms_to_dd(longitude), dms_to_dd(latitude)) print(loc["features"][1]["properties"]["place_formatted"]) print('-' * 80)