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Geotager

How to change the GPS location of a photo

To change the GPS location of a photo you have to rewrite the coordinates stored inside the file. Drop the photo on Geotager, type or paste a new latitude and longitude, and download it. The image is never re-encoded, and the file comes back the exact size it went in.

Change a photo’s location in four steps

  1. Open the tool and drop the photo on the pink circle — or paste it with Ctrl+V, or click to pick it from your files.
  2. The location already stored in the file appears straight away, next to the file name. If nothing appears, the photo carries none, and what you want is adding one rather than changing one.
  3. Type or paste the new coordinates. Decimal degrees (43.9493, 4.8055) and degrees-minutes-seconds (43° 56′ 57.5″ N, 4° 48′ 19.8″ E) are both accepted. In Google Maps, right-clicking a spot and clicking the numbers copies them in the first form. There is also a map you can click, folded away until you ask for it.
  4. Download. The original name is kept, with -geotagged added, so the new file never silently overwrites the old one.

What actually changes inside the file

Cameras and phones store a block of information in the file, called EXIF. The position lives there in a slightly odd shape: not as the decimal number you typed, but as degrees, minutes and seconds, plus two separate fields saying which hemisphere — GPSLatitudeRef is “N” or “S”, GPSLongitudeRef is “E” or “W”. Getting the numbers right and those two letters wrong puts your photo in the wrong quarter of the world, which is the single most common defect in tools that write this block.

Changing a location that is already there replaces those values in place: the file produced is byte-for-byte the size of the original, and nothing moves. That matters more than it sounds. A camera’s MakerNote — the manufacturer’s own block, holding lens corrections and shooting data — is full of addresses pointing at absolute positions in the file. A tool that rewrites the whole block shifts those positions and silently breaks it. Geotager writes only the bytes of the location and then compares the produced file to the original everywhere else.

The pixels are never touched at all. Many browser-based tools decode the image into a canvas and re-encode it, which loses quality on every pass and throws away everything they did not think to copy. Nothing here decodes the image; a 40-megapixel photo is edited without ever being drawn.

A photo can hold the location twice — once in EXIF, once in a descriptive text packet called XMP. Change one and forget the other, and a viewer that reads the second one still shows the old place. Both are handled together, which is also why removal is checked twice over.

Changing it in Google Photos or Apple Photos is not the same thing

Both let you edit the location of a picture, and both are editing their own record of it. The library shows the new place immediately; the file on disk may still say the old one. If you then download or export the original and send it to someone, the coordinates that travel are whatever the file holds — which is why people are surprised to find a location they thought they had corrected months ago.

The way to settle it takes ten seconds: export the photo, then read the location back out of the exported file. If the old coordinates are still in there, the edit lived in the app, not in the photo.

Which files accept a change, and which do not

JPEG, HEIC and AVIF (what iPhones produce), PNG, WebP in its extended form, and TIFF can all have their location read, changed, added and removed. Three limits are worth knowing before you act rather than after:

  • Camera raw files — DNG, NEF, CR2 — accept having a location removed, never having one added. A raw file is an irreplaceable original, and a raw file is a TIFF: damaging one would be irreversible.
  • A simple-form WebP has nowhere in it to put a location. It can be read, not given one.
  • Videos work — MOV and MP4, all four operations. The one exception is an action camera: it records where it went second by second, all along the recording, and that trail sits among the images themselves. We can show you the location of such a file, and we will not change it, because half a removal is worse than none.

The tool says which of these applies to your file the moment you drop it, before you have done anything. The full table is on the home page, and it is rendered from the same code the engine reads, so it cannot drift from what the tool can actually do.

Changing several photos at once

Drop the whole batch. Each file is read, the location you give is written into every one that accepts it, and the results come back as a single ZIP. Files that cannot take the change are named and handed back untouched rather than quietly skipped — a batch that reports success for forty photos and silently dropped three is the worst possible outcome for this kind of tool.

Check that the change landed

Every file produced here is read back before it reaches you, by our reader and by a second one written by other people. If the location read back does not match the one you asked for, or if the two readers disagree, the operation is declared failed and your original is handed back intact. That is the check we can run; the one you can run is better, because it does not depend on us at all: 

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

ExifTool is the reference in this field, free and offline. The -n asks for plain decimal numbers instead of degrees and minutes, which makes them easy to paste straight back into a map.

Questions that come up

Does changing the location also change the date?

No. Only the bytes of the position are written. The date, the camera, the exposure settings and the lens are left exactly as they were — and the tool proves it, by comparing every other byte of the file to the original.

Will the new location survive being uploaded somewhere?

Often not. Most social networks re-encode your photo on upload and lose the whole EXIF block in the process, the location with it. That is a side effect of their pipeline, not a promise, and it is not consistent — which apps keep a photo’s location and which drop it goes through what actually happens.

Can I change the location of a screenshot or a scan?

Those files usually have no location at all, so there is nothing to change. Giving them one is a different operation, with different limits: adding a location to a photo that has none.

What if I want the location gone rather than moved?

Then do not put a decoy coordinate in — remove it. Removing the location takes it out of both places it can hide, and checks afterwards that no trace survived.