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Geotager

How to add a location to a photo that has none

Adding a location and changing one are two different operations. Drop the photo on Geotager, give it coordinates, and download: a fresh block is appended at the end of the file and a single address is repointed, so nothing already in the file moves. The tool says up front whether your file will accept one.

Which photos have no location at all

  • Scans of old prints. The negative knew where it was; the scanner did not.
  • Screenshots and exports. Nothing about them ever had a position.
  • Photos from a camera without GPS. Most cameras that are not phones have none, unless they were paired with one.
  • Photos taken with location switched off — deliberately or not.
  • Photos that went through something that stripped it — a messaging app, a social upload, an export that re-encoded.

If you are not sure which case you are in, read the file first. A photo that already carries a location needs the change operation, which behaves differently.

Add a location in four steps

  1. Drop the photo. The tool reads it and tells you, before you touch anything, whether a location can be created in this file.
  2. Find the coordinates of the place — see below if you do not have them yet.
  3. Paste or type them, in decimal (43.9493, 4.8055) or in degrees-minutes-seconds. The folded map does the same job by clicking, if you would rather point than type.
  4. Download. The name gains a -geotagged suffix, so nothing is overwritten.

Finding the coordinates of a place

In Google Maps, right-click the spot: the first line of the menu is the latitude and longitude, and clicking it copies them in decimal form — exactly the form to paste here. On OpenStreetMap, the same thing lives under “Show address”, and the coordinates appear in the address bar as you move around.

Both forms are accepted, and both mean the same thing. 43.9493, 4.8055 is 43° 56′ 57.48″ north, 4° 48′ 19.8″ east. Latitude always comes first, and negative numbers mean south and west.

Do not invent precision you do not have. The fifth decimal is about a metre. If what you actually know is “somewhere in this village”, writing seven decimals states something false with great confidence — and a photo library will happily draw it on a map as if you had measured it. Three decimals is roughly a hundred metres, and is often the honest answer for a scan.

What adding a location does to the file

Changing a location that is already present rewrites values in place, and the file produced is exactly the size of the original. Adding one cannot be free: there was no room set aside for it, so the file necessarily grows a little.

What matters is where it grows. The naive approach — rebuild the information block with the new field inserted in the middle — shifts everything after it, and a camera’s MakerNote is full of addresses pointing at absolute positions in the file. That is exactly how a well-meaning tool corrupts lens data it never intended to touch. Here, a new block is appended at the end and a single address at the front of the file is repointed at it. Every existing offset stays valid, because nothing existing has moved.

Files that will not accept one, and why

  • Camera raw — DNG, NEF, CR2. Removal is offered, adding is not. A raw file is a TIFF, and it is somebody’s irreplaceable original; a mistake there cannot be undone. If you need a located copy, export a JPEG or a TIFF from your developer and add the location to that.
  • A simple-form WebP. The format in that shape has nowhere to put a location. It can be read; it cannot be given one. Re-saving it as an extended WebP, a PNG or a JPEG gives it somewhere to go — at the cost of re-encoding, which this tool deliberately never does on your behalf.
  • Videos that record a moving location. An action camera writes where it went second by second, among the images themselves. Ordinary MOV and MP4 files accept a location like any photo; those do not, and they say so before you act.
  • Files whose information block is already at the format’s limit. Rare, and announced when it happens rather than discovered afterwards.

Every one of these is stated when you drop the file, before you have done anything — the table on the home page is rendered from the same code the engine reads, so it cannot claim an ability the tool does not have.

Check it took

The file is read back before it reaches you, by this engine and by a second reader written by other people; a disagreement cancels the operation and hands you the original. The check that does not depend on us: 

exiftool -gps:all -n photo-geotagged.jpg

You should see the latitude and longitude you gave, and the two hemisphere fields that go with them. If a photo library still shows nothing, close and reopen it: many of them cache what they read the first time.

A whole trip at once

Photos from one place can be done together: drop the batch, give the coordinates once, and the results come back as a single ZIP. Files that cannot take a location are named and handed back untouched rather than quietly skipped.

If instead you want the location gone from a batch — removing it works the same way, and checks twice that nothing survived.