Plex Photos - Incorrect Geolocation Parsing Issue

General Discussions
1

Greetings Plex-Photo Team,

As of the latest Plex version update (v 1.41.3.9292), I have found that the photo EXIF meta data for GPS location is no longer being processed correctly.

Specifically, it appears that a JPEG photo’s EXIF longitude value is being misinterpreted as latitude and the longitude value is being missed entirely and is misinterpreted as “0.0000”. I see this new and incorrect behavior consistently across all of my photo libraries and photos.

Here is an example of the issue…
The below zipped photo (IMG_3770.JPG) has EXIF GPS coordinates, Latitude 42° 30’ 13.840000" North and Longitude 70° 50’ 47.800000" West. (Note - I had to zip it to ensure it retained the original EXIF meta-data)
IMG_3770.zip (1.5 MB)

These are correctly represented in its EXIF meta-data as shown in this ACDSee screenshot (lower right corner). Other photo renderers / editors also show the correct EXIF GPS meta-data.

IMG_3770_EXIF-SS
IMG_3770_EXIF-SS744×672 104 KB

Plex’s Photo analysis and resulting XML for Geolocation is incorrectly processing EXIF GPS data to be “Coordinates latitude=”-70.84662" longitude=“0.00000"”. See the below screenshot of the XML.
131421-xml(SS)
131421-xml(SS)1258×676 131 KB

In this example you can clearly see that the real EXIF longitude is being misinterpreted as latitude and longitude is incorrectly being assigned a null value of “0.00000”.

Here are the particulars of my Plex server and software versions…
Plex Version 1.41.3.9292
Photo library agent in use: “Photos”

Server is a Synology Model: DS423+
Synology OS version: DSM 7.2.2-72806 Update 2

I look forward to your response and hopefully a prompt fix to this apparent bug.

2

Hi. I am having the same issue : longitude is wrongly set to zero and latitude is set to the longitude in plex. Other tools such as exiftool are seeing the real values :

Capture d'écran 2024-12-21 123709
Capture d'écran 2024-12-21 123709443×123 4.08 KB

Capture d'écran 2024-12-21 123646
Capture d'écran 2024-12-21 123646669×531 12.9 KB

Running on latest Plex server v1.41.3.9314

5

Apologies for the late reply here, but we’ve identified the issue and are testing a fix now. Hopefully we’ll be able to get the fix into a server update shortly.

2 Likes
6

Is there any update to this? As well, are there any plans to allow Plex to read exif data from photos? Seems to be an easy fix and would be very helpful for location data.

7

The exif data is what we’re already using to extract the location data from photos. The issue here is a database serialisation issue, not related to reading the tags.

8

Thanks for the reply. Is there anything I can do to fix the serialisation issue? I’d love to use Plex for photos, but my photo location data shows up on some photos and not others.

9

Nothing for now, the fix will be in a future server update and shouldn’t require any action in your part.