[Feature] Enter address or coordinates for media geolocation

[bpmcgill]

The feature

When I am editing the meta data of my images, I would like to be able to enter an address or coordinates for the geolocation of the media file. I have a lot of photos that were taken with the GPS information turned off.

Here is a photo of where the feature would be added

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[bo0tzz]

Closing as a duplicate of #8380, which requests coordinate support. Supporting the detail level of addresses is not feasible without calling out to external APIs, which we won't do.

[bpmcgill]

That seems like a missed opportunity. Perhaps you should allow the user to make that decision and take on the financial responsibility of choosing the option. What API is used for this?

[JuGuSm]

Closing as a duplicate of #8380, which requests coordinate support. Supporting the detail level of addresses is not feasible without calling out to external APIs, which we won't do.

That's strange because at the end the coordinates are stored in a xmp file so we could simply store directly the coordinates entered by the user.

[nielstron]

I agree with @bpmcgill that the user should have the option to call an external API if they so wish (configurable through the settings).

There are both non-free (i.e. Google) and OS-based (i.e. Nominatim) options.

[nielstron]

A thread for a possible remedy for this issue.

it seems like the meat of the stuff is happening here:

• call the searchPlaces API from the frontend:

  immich/web/src/lib/components/shared-components/change-location.svelte

  Line 74 in 14e6d23

  searchPlaces({ name: searchWord })

• implementation of searchPlaces API by SQL query inside server stored locations:

  immich/server/src/repositories/search.repository.ts

  Line 274 in 14e6d23

  async searchPlaces(placeName: string): Promise<GeodataPlacesEntity[]> {

• searchPlaces service calls the searchPlace SQL query implementation:

  immich/server/src/services/search.service.ts

  Line 49 in 14e6d23

  async searchPlaces(dto: SearchPlacesDto): Promise<PlacesResponseDto[]> {

I will try to replace this searchPlaces implementation with a (wrapped) call to the nominatim API. in a next step the user should be able to opt-in to this implementation.

[zackpollard]

Hey, appreciate the want to implement this, however we have discussed this numerous times internally and we are trying to remove calls to third-party external services, not add them. Also, we have specifically moved away from nominatim and OSM at our own expense (hosting a tile server) as we don't want the relatively large user base of immich adding additional load to their servers, which are paid for by donations and have very severe rate limits due to that. Check their usage policy here https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim/
We have improvements coming to the reverse geocoding implementation soon that will also bring improvements to search. We may also look into providing our own hosted search for this in the future, which might have compatiblity with the nominatim API itself, but for now we aren't looking to make changes in this area.

[nielstron]

Hi, thanks for the quick response. I am definitely not trying to overwhelm Nominatim or make it the default for all users, I was more looking into using an API in general that can then be swapped out by end users and potentially point to a hosted version of nominatim. I think it would be great if there is a hosted version of Nominatim by immich, though I do also see that the resource requirements would be quite significant. I also looked into paid alternatives, most cost as much as a server for self-hosting (and don't offer pay-by-usage unfortunately).

Overall though I think this particular feature would be well suited for using an external API because there are relatively few, user-tiggered, requests, that require significant resources to handle und thus forbid self-hosting for most end-users.

I will wait for further action until you pushed the new reverse geocoding features into the main database.

[bo0tzz]

I am definitely not trying to overwhelm Nominatim or make it the default for all users, I was more looking into using an API in general that can then be swapped out by end users and potentially point to a hosted version of nominatim.

This is sensible, but realistically most users would end up just pointing at the freely available OSM instance anyways.