Why is the location data so bad?

[DavidMooreUK]

I have photos from places like Universal Studios and the Circuit of the Americas. The COTA shows up as Garfield, Texas. While I'm sure that's correct, I am never going to search by 'Garfield' if I am looking for my COTA photos. All major photo platforms recognize it as COTA.

Same ridiculous story for Universal Studios - that's all I have dared put into the platform so far and won't be putting anymore in unless I can resolve this properly. Am I doing something wrong?

[bo0tzz]

Fine-grained reverse geocoding like you're looking for takes an immense amount of data, which isn't feasible for us to ship in Immich. We use data from geonames.org and just resolve to the nearest population center.

[DavidMooreUK]

Why not allow users to use a preferred API for the data? Or did I miss this in the settings?

[bo0tzz]

In part, because most users would end up pointing it at OSM's free nominatim instance and that's not what it's there for.

[DavidMooreUK]

Which could be easily solved by only coding entry points for paid APIs like Googles.

[bo0tzz]

If we were to add remote support at all it would be for something free and open source like Nominatim, not a proprietary paid one...

[MichelZ]

I've built exactly this now, it uses overture maps and uses a place's geometry/bounding box, not just a point on the map to calculate the place:
Docs: https://immich-reversegeo.github.io/
GitHub: https://github.com/immich-reversegeo/immich-reversegeo