EXIF data question

[Jurek]

Over the weekend I received some images of work which was carried out overnight in Romania.
The EXIF data shows the images to have been created at around 03:00 am  - which tallies with when the job was completed.
However the lat. and lon. coordinates on the GPS place my fitters a couple of hundred miles north of the Azores, in the briny, as opposed to around 25km away from Bucharest.

What goes on there?

[fuaran]

Are you mixing up east and west? Azores is about 25° west, Bucharest is 25° east.

How are you viewing the EXIF data?

[Kim]

Are you mixing up east and west? Azores is about 25° west, Bucharest is 25° east.

I've come across this a couple of times in software libraries, where latitude and longitude are represented as floats.  Everyone seems to find it intuitive that positive latitude means north of the equator, but sometimes programmers (presumably USAnians) decide to represent longitudes west of the meridian as positive.  With hilarious consequences.

[Jurek]

Are you mixing up east and west? Azores is about 25° west, Bucharest is 25° east.

How are you viewing the EXIF data?

Taking the numbers from the 'properties' window of the image, and putting them into google maps.
The Azores may be a bit of a red herring (on my part). It is simply the nearest land mass. The actual coordinates are well north of these islands, and very firmly in the N.Atlantic.

[andrew_s]

The latitude of Bucharest would put a +/- error on the longitude at about 400 miles north of the Azores, more or less level with the north coast of Spain.
Try putting the EXIF lat/long into google maps, but with a positive longitude
eg https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@44.5,25.5,10z
where 44.5 is N/S latitude, 22.5 is E/W longitude, and 10z is the zoom level (higher zoom numbers give a smaller area)

The other thing I've come across is coordinate order options - i.e. the ability to select either latitude,longitude or longitude,latitude.
This does rather imply that it sometimes varies.

[fuaran]

The Windows Properties shows the value of the latitude and longitude, but it doesn't specify whether it is north/south or east/west. So you can't actually tell which hemisphere it is actually in.

Also possible confusion between decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds. But that should be a fairly small position error.

[Jurek]

I think andrew_s has it 

[clarion]

A textbook example of the difference between accuracy and precision