Wrong city is detected

[golibali]

The bug

I live in the countryside of Budapest, in a small town. All the photos what I take in the town is registered by Immich to the town next to us ( there is a hill between us) I checked some of the images coordinates and they are in the town (eg: 47,5767277777778 N, 18,8796 E) and is registered as it is in the Pilisszetivan town.

The OS that Immich Server is running on

Ubuntu 22.04

Version of Immich Server

v1.115.0

Version of Immich Mobile App

1.115.0 build.175

Platform with the issue

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

Your docker-compose.yml content

Same as recommended here: https://immich.app/docs/install/docker-compose/

Your .env content

Same as recommended here: https://immich.app/docs/install/docker-compose/

Reproduction steps

1. Take an image in town
2. Mobile app uploads
3. Immich server tag with wrong town label
   ...

Relevant log output

No response

Additional information

I found this ticket: #4745
I this ticket the https://www.geonames.org/ was mentioned as Immich gets info from there. I checked the wrong "Plilisszentiván" town and the rectengle not overlaps with the geo locations of my images. The right town name would be "Nagykovácsi". There are 3 of them on this page, but they are almost covering the same place. Could this be the root issue, that there are multiple entities for one town in the geonames database?

[SanoKriss]

I have same problem with another location 48,1945059722222 17,053632 detected as Devínska Nová Ves and should be Lamač

[mmomjian]

The way we handle geo boundaries will be changed in a future release. Currently this is an expected behavior. Thank you

[SanoKriss]

So, tell me please, which method is used? Thanks

[golibali]

Also why do you close this issue as the bug is valid, I mean it tags images with wrong location.

[kvalev]

Immich uses the data from the cities500.txt file. So your picture will be geo located in the closest village with a population of more than 500 (within some radius). You can check the geonames data and correct it if needed.

[golibali]

@kvalev Thanks, that is the issue here. The "Nagykovácsi" town geo location in the cities500.txt is way too wrong, it's more than 12 km far from the real location of the town.
I checked in this, just for the record: https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/cities500.zip

[zackpollard]

This is where it appears on geonames, which does appear to be wrong. You can correct this by going to geonames.org and changing the location of the populated place marker 🙂

[SanoKriss]

Immich uses the data from the cities500.txt file. So your picture will be geo located in the closest village with a population of more than 500 (within some radius). You can check the geonames data and correct it if needed.

Lamač is part of Bratislava populated with more than 7000 people, but is not in that file. I will check it in geonames, they have several sources of data, for example in allcountry.zip Lamač is there. This is problem of "dirty" data and I understand using source file (cities500.txt) but this not solved problem (not only my). Photos geolocation is wrong marked to nearest city/village.

[kvalev]

You can add the population for Lamac here and after the next immich release if you refresh your metadata, the location should be corrected.
The immich solution is not ideal, but it is what it is and it probably is gonna take a while until another one is in place, so you have to work with what you got.

[mertalev]

We're planning on making changes that will make reverse geocoding more accurate. I believe this will also involve using OSM data instead of GeoNames.