Add a location to iMovie '09 travel maps

Feb 02, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Nelsok

Are you using the new travel maps feature of iMovie '09, but finding that the location list does not contain the place you are looking for? Or (as I have found), do you think Apple may have made a mistake with the location? For instance, St. Petersburg in Russia appears miles inland rather than on the coast as it should be. That's because the latitude coordinates have been entered as 56, instead of 59, putting it three degrees south of where it should be. Here's how to add or correct a places entry in iMovie '09.

Select iMovie in the Applications folder, then Control-click on it and pick Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Navigate into Contents » Resources and look for the text file WorldLocations.txt. This is a tab-delimited file, where each line contains four entries: Place, Region, Country and Latitude/Longitude.

So if you want to add Karlskrona in Sweden, you would enter on a new line at the end of the file. The first entry on the line would be Karlskronaa, then press the Tab key. If there were to be two places call Karlskrona in Sweden, you would next enter the regional location. In this case, that would be Blekinge County followed by another Tab. Next would come the country (Sweden) followed by another Tab. Finally, you would enter the latitude and longitude in decimal values. The two values are separated with a comma.

So in its final form, the above example would read as follows (the spaces between each entry are presses of the Tab key):

Karlskrona     Blekinge County     Sweden     56.184348,15.626846
If you don't want any regional information, you would just enter a tab in the unused column, so the above could just read:
Karlskrona          Sweden     56.184348,15.626846
As there is no second place in Sweden called Karlskrona, the regional information in the above case would be surplus to requirements, making the second way more appropriate.

If you are not using Apple's TextEdit to edit the file, make sure that when you save the file that it is saved as a plain text file. If you need to convert degrees, minutes, and seconds for latitude and longitude into decimal form, you can use this site for details on how to do it, or just search the net for a converter.

Of course, to amend an entry, you would just find it in the list and amend the appropriate column. Just be careful not to overwrite the invisible tab character between the items, or the invisible carriage return character at the end of the line. Even if you do, however, I don't think it will cause much of a issue if you do. I had missed a Tab on an entry I had added, and it just displayed the latitude and longitude appended to the country name in the drop-down list in iMovie. However, best to be on the safe side, and take care when altering.

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