Updated June 2026 — originally published May 2016
Your iPhone geotags every photo automatically. Your DSLR or mirrorless camera almost certainly does not. Sometimes your best photos and most precious memories lack geotags.
That gap — between smartphone shots that know where they were taken and camera shots that don’t — is the whole reason geotagging software exists.
If all your photos come from a phone, you probably don’t need this article. But if you shoot with a dedicated camera, or if you care whether your location data survives a switch from one app to another, read on.
Know where you took that photo
By adding geotags to your photos, you basically “pin” them to the places they were taken. Geotags create a permanent record of where a photo was taken.
They allow photo cataloging tools like Apple Photos and Adobe Lightroom to organize photos by location.
Geotags add to the “story” of a photo. A photo pinned to a map – at the exact spot where it was taken – has context. A series of tagged photos documents the path taken. There are several options to share your photos with their geoinformation. Google Photos and Flickr for example can show their location an map. With Google My Maps or Google Earth, you can display a series of photos pinned to their locations.
Find that photo
Years from now, you may not remember when you took the photo you are looking for. But you will remember roughly where you took it.
Sometimes, you need to find a good picture of a specific spot. For example, you want to illustrate a blog post on the Golden Gate Bridge. Over the past years, you’ve visited the site several times and took a lot of different pictures. In this case, searching by date will prove arduous. Consulting a map with all your images represented by pins is a lot more efficient.
What geotagging actually does
A geotag is a GPS coordinate embedded directly in the image file — in the EXIF or XMP metadata, not in an app’s database. That distinction matters more than it sounds.
Apple Photos lets you assign locations to photos. But those assignments live in Apple Photos’ library database. Access the photo files directly, switch to Lightroom, restore from a backup — the locations are gone. EXIF GPS data travels with the file. Copy to anywhere, import into anything, and the location comes with it.
This is also what makes geotagging different from just “adding location in the app.” One survives software changes. The other doesn’t.
The map view problem
Every serious photo management tool — Apple Photos, Lightroom Classic, Capture One — has a map view. For phone photos, it works great. For DSLR and mirrorless shots, it shows nothing, because those files have no GPS data.
If you shoot with both a phone and a camera on the same trip, you end up with a split library: half your photos on the map, half invisible. Geotagging the camera shots puts everything in the same place.
How you actually add GPS to camera photos on a Mac
There are three main approaches, and which one you use depends on how you shoot.
GPX track log. Record your route on a GPS device or iPhone app while you’re out shooting. Back at your desk, load the track log and your photos into HoudahGeo. It matches each photo to the track by timestamp — no GPS-enabled camera needed. This is the most accurate method when it works, and it works most of the time.
Reference photos from your phone. Take a quick snapshot with your iPhone at each location (or every few locations). HoudahGeo can match your camera shots to nearby reference photos by timestamp. Useful when you forgot to record a track, or when you’re moving around in ways that don’t produce a clean route.
Manual placement on a map. Drag photos to locations on HoudahGeo’s built-in map. Slower, but good for filling in gaps or geotagging archive photos you took years ago.
Once the photos are geocoded — the location where they were taken “pinned” to the map — HoudahGeo can write GPS coordinates into the actual image files — EXIF, XMP, and IPTC — so the location is visible everywhere, not just in HoudahGeo.
The archiving argument
Here’s a scenario worth thinking about: you spend a few years managing your photo library in Apple Photos, carefully assigning locations. Then you switch to Lightroom. You export your photos. The location assignments don’t come with them — they were stored in Apple Photos’ library, not in the files.
Had those same photos been geotagged with EXIF data, every exported file would already have the GPS coordinates embedded. Lightroom would read them on import and place them on the map automatically, with no extra work.
The difference between location data in an app and location data in a file is the difference between data you own and data you’re borrowing.
When it’s worth the extra step
Not everyone needs to geotag. If you shoot primarily on a phone, the location is already there. If you shoot at a fixed location (studio, events at known venues), the GPS coordinates add little.
It’s worth the effort when:
- You travel and want to navigate your photo library by place rather than date
- You use a DSLR or mirrorless and care about a unified map view
- You’re building a long-term archive and want the location data to outlast any particular app
- You shoot with multiple cameras and want all of them in the same location-aware library
The actual process, once you have a workflow set up, takes a few minutes per shoot. A track log recorded on your phone runs automatically in the background while you’re out. Back home, HoudahGeo matches the photos and writes the tags. Then you’re done.
How HoudahGeo fits in
HoudahGeo is a Mac app built specifically for this. It reads GPX, NMEA, and other track log formats. It geotags both photos and videos — including drone footage and action cam clips, which share the same GPS-less problem as DSLR bodies. And it writes changes back to Apple Photos so your library stays in sync.
To permanently attach the geotags to your photos, HoudahGeo writes future-proof EXIF and XMP tags to JPEG and RAW image and video files — just like a GPS-enabled camera. HoudahGeo’s sharing options include creating Google Earth KML and KMZ files from GPS tracks and photos.
There’s a free trial if you want to test it with your own photos and track logs before buying.