How to geo-tag a photo

Geo-tagging is a nice way to categorise photos, especially when you’re out for those once-in-a-lifetime trips. Thankfully, most of us take photos on our phones these days, and most smartphones will, by default, geo-tag your photos. Geo-tagging is another term for location tagging where photos carry the latitude and longitude coordinates of the area in which they were taken.

Geo-tagging a photo is convenient and happens by default, but what happens to the photos you’ve taken with your mirrorless camera, or perhaps you’ve disabled location data. What about older photos that you took at a time when geotagging wasn’t an option? Well, here’s what you can do.

Geo-tagging via Google Photos

You can geo-tag photos stored in your Android smartphone quite easily. You could, for example, import older or untagged photos to your storage and then start tagging them via Google Photos.

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On an Android phone you can simply open Google Photos, tap on the photo you want to edit, tap the ‘more’ icon, tap ‘Add a location’, and then choose from a list of locations or pick something from a map. You can follow the same steps to remove location data from a photo as well in case you don’t want to save or share that information.

Other options include heading to photos.google.com, or using the Google Photos app on an Apple device. The steps will remain the same as listed above for Android devices. Third-party apps are available for geo-tagging as well, but we wouldn’t recommend using them without thoroughly inspecting their respective privacy and data handling policies.

Geo-tagging via Apple Photos

On a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, geotagging is quite easy as well. Open the Photos app and navigate to the photo you want to tag. Now swipe up on the photo or tap the ‘i’ icon to view the photo’s metadata. Tap on ‘Add a location’ and enter the name of the place you want to tag. You can then refine the selection by tapping on the map interface.

Geo-tagging photos with Adobe Lightroom

If you use a mirrorless camera or DSLR, chances are good that you’re also using Lightroom to edit those photos. If you are, geo-tagging photos in bulk can be done by dragging photos from your filmstrip onto the map or by making a selection and right-clicking on it to ‘Add GPS location’.

That’s it! You can easily use existing tools and even cloud services to geo-tag photos on any device or platform. We’d recommend first doing this album-by-album with city tags and then fine-tuning the selections later.