Is it possible, in an iPhone app, to extract location information (geocode, I suppose it's called) from a photo taken with the iPhone camera?
If there is no API call to do it, is there any known way to parse the bytes of data to extract the information? Something I can roll on my own?
Unfortunately no.
The problem is thus;
A jpeg file consists of several parts. For this question the ones we are interested in are the image data and the exif data. The image data is the picture and the exif data are where things like geocoding, shutter speed, camera type and so on are stored.
A UIImage (and CGImage) only contain image data, no tags.
When the image picker selects an image (either from the library or the camera) it returns a UIImage, not a jpeg. This UIImage is created from the jpeg image data, but the exif data in the jpeg is discarded.
This means this data is not in the UIImage at all and thus is not accessible.
Look here. It is a library you can use to do what you want: http://iphone-exif.googlecode.com/files/iphone-exif-guide-0.8.pdf