Picasa loses GPS altitude information

There is a major problem with many of our major photo tools damaging and losing EXIF information.
Picasa is my main photo management tool and I have been pleased with its ability to manage and detect GPS information as well as use IPTC tags and captions.

However I just discovered by accident that Picasa Version 2.7 (Build 37.49.0) will damage your GPS altitude information, if you manipulate the image at all.  It appears to even be touching the original image.

I had an image with embedded altitude of 111m, I cropped, added IPTC keywords and caption, and uploaded to Pbase.  GPS lat/long correct, altitude gone.  IrfanView EXIF inspection confirms altitude is gone.

GPS altitude was intact for an image from the exact same set, in the same directory, also managed in Picasa, but not touched (no keywords, caption, photo manipulation of any kind).

Here are the two images:

snowy trees - altitude lost - http://maps.pbase.com//image/94154176
snow groomer - altitude fine - http://maps.pbase.com/image/94154260

You can see the altitude in the "info" tab for each image above on PBase Maps.

Comments

[Benjamin]

I've been able to use exiftool ( http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ ) to restore metadata that Picasa clobbered. If you run exiftool with "-F0", it will recalculate the proper offsets that Picasa screwed up. There are some cases where this won't work depending on your tool flow, but I've had great success with it. I have since stopped using Picasa.

- Benjamin