You switched to a Mac. Good. But now your geotagging workflow is broken — GeoSetter is Windows-only, and it always has been.
If you spent years building that habit — recording a GPX track on a hike, syncing it with your camera photos back at home, watching coordinates land in your EXIF data — you know how satisfying it is. You don’t want to give that up. You just need it to work on macOS.
HoudahGeo is the closest thing to a Mac equivalent. It covers the same core workflow: load your photos, import a GPS track log, let the software match timestamps and assign coordinates. It also supports manual geotagging by dropping photos onto a map, reverse geocoding to fill in city and country names, and writing everything to EXIF, XMP, and IPTC tags without recompressing your images.
There are real differences too, mostly in HoudahGeo’s favor. It integrates directly with Apple Photos and Adobe Lightroom Classic. It can geotag videos — useful if you shoot drone footage or action cam clips alongside stills. And it’s actively maintained; version 7 shipped in 2025 with a new interface and the video support.
GeoSetter, by contrast, has been largely dormant since its last release in 2022 (version 3.5.3). Development stalled around 2011 by the author’s own account, with only occasional patches since. The Google Maps integration started showing “For development purposes only” watermarks after Google changed its API pricing in 2018. It still works for many people, but it runs on a Windows runtime and there is no Mac version.
How the two compare
| GeoSetter | HoudahGeo | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | Windows only | macOS only |
| Current version | 3.5.3 (2022) | 7.1 (2025) |
| Price | Free | $39 (free trial available) |
| GPX track sync | Yes | Yes |
| Manual map geotagging | Yes | Yes |
| Reverse geocoding | Yes | Yes |
| JPEG support | Yes | Yes |
| RAW support | Yes | Yes |
| Video geotagging | No | Yes |
| Apple Photos integration | No | Yes |
| Lightroom Classic integration | No | Yes |
| XMP sidecar support | Yes | Yes |
| Active development | No | Yes |
Getting started
The workflow will feel familiar. In HoudahGeo, you load your photos — from a folder, from your Photos library, or from a Lightroom catalog — then import your GPX file. The software matches images to track points by timestamp. You review the result on the map, adjust anything that landed wrong, then write the tags to your files.
One thing to set up before your first sync: the camera time offset. HoudahGeo has a dedicated Camera Setup tool for this. If your camera clock was off by a few minutes or drifted from GPS time, that’s where you fix it. Worth doing before you sync a large batch.
HoudahGeo is free to try. The trial exports five images at a time, which is enough to test your track sync workflow before you buy. Requires macOS 12.4 Monterey or later.