swift UIImagePickerController and extracting EXIF data from existing photos - swift

Question

I need to get location data (coordinates for latitude and longitude) from an image picked from PhotoLibrary using UIImagePickerController. Existing answers proposes using fetchAssetsWithALAssetURLs, but it is deprecated for iOS 8 to 11, so I wonder what's the alternative?
Thanks!

Answer 1

This worked for me. For new iOS versions, use the following lines of code.
var asset: PHAsset?
asset = info[UIImagePickerControllerPHAsset] as? PHAsset
Note that asset = nil if the user did not give permission to access his Photo Library since the PHAsset data is sensitive.
To obtain permission, edit Info.plist accordingly and request for permission using PHPhotoLibrary.requestAuthorization().

Answer 2

If you are only supporting iOS 11 and later then you can directly get the PHAsset using the .phAsset key. You only need to use PHAsset fetchAssetsWithALAssetURLs if you need to support iOS 10 or earlier.
Once you have the PHAsset reference, then you can access the location property to get the coordinates of the image.
func imagePickerController(_ picker: UIImagePickerController, didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo info: [UIImagePickerController.InfoKey : Any]) {
var asset: PHAsset?
if #available(iOS 11.0, *) {
asset = info[.phAsset] as? PHAsset
} else {
if let url = info[.referenceURL] as? URL {
let result = PHAsset.fetchAssets(withALAssetURLs: [url], options: nil)
asset = result.firstObject
}
}
if let asset = asset {
if let location = asset.location {
print("Image location is \(location.coordinate.latitude), \(location.coordinate.longitude)")
}
}
}