Fix Photos That Show the Wrong Location
Scenario: your files contain location data — but it's incorrect or misleading.
This guide is for you if: your photos show up in the wrong place. Maybe you set a manual location in the camera before a previous trip and forgot to change it, or the GPS module had a bad fix — sometimes photos land in the middle of the ocean. Or the coordinates are accurate but misleading: they tag the spot you were standing on, not the landmark you were photographing.
Nothing is written to your files until you click an Apply button, and the old values are only overwritten for the files you select — so mixed batches, where some files are correct and others aren’t, are safe to work on.
Step 1: See the problem on the map
Add your files and switch to the Map view (or Side-by-Side). Every file with GPS coordinates appears on the map — pictures from your Paris trip clustered in the Indian Ocean stand out immediately.
To check a single suspicious file, select it in the table and click Add Pin next to its GPS coordinates in the sidebar: the map jumps to wherever the stored coordinates actually point. Another giveaway is the greyed-out place-name suggestions — if a photo of the Eiffel Tower proposes a city on another continent, the coordinates are wrong.
Step 2: Select the wrongly-placed files
Either select them in the file table, or select them directly on the map: choose the rectangular selection tool in the map’s toolbar and drag a rectangle around the misplaced files. Files taken at the same (wrong) location cluster together, which makes this quick.
Step 3: Drop a pin where they actually belong
Search for the correct place in the map’s search field (“Search places or enter coordinates”), then use the Drop a new pin tool to mark the exact spot — precisely the same workflow as when adding locations from scratch.
Step 4: Overwrite the coordinates
With the wrongly-placed files selected, click Apply next to the pin’s coordinates. The old GPS values are overwritten. Media Location Tagger keeps the legacy metadata and the modern XMP packet in sync, so the files won’t silently disagree with themselves when they later round-trip through Lightroom or Photos.
Step 5: Fix the names too
Wrong coordinates usually mean wrong (or now-mismatched) place names. Apply the suggested names for the new position from the pin’s section, or set the fields yourself — watch out for suggestions reintroducing what you didn’t want (“Milsons Point” and “NSW” when you wanted “Sydney Harbour Bridge” and “New South Wales”): just type the values you prefer and apply them. The place-names guide covers this in detail.
Special case: right coordinates, wrong subject
A photo of the Empire State Building taken from the Top of the Rock carries the coordinates of the observation deck, not the building. That’s accurate — but if you want the photo tagged with its subject:
- select the file and click Add Pin next to its GPS coordinates — the map jumps to the vantage point,
- find the actual subject on the map and drop a pin on it,
- apply the pin’s coordinates and place names to the file.
Whether you tag the vantage point or the subject is a matter of intent — Media Location Tagger simply lets you choose.
If something can’t be written
If a write fails on any file, you’ll be told which file and why — see the troubleshooting guide for what the error messages mean.