Use a Phone Photo as the Location Reference
Scenario: your camera has no GPS, but you took one iPhone photo at each stop, and you want the camera shots to get the phone shots' locations.
This guide is for you if: your camera doesn’t record GPS, and instead of a track log or the maker’s phone-app link you took one photo with your phone at each place you stopped. The phone shots show a green check in the GPS column; the camera files show a grey “no data” icon. You want each stop’s camera shots to get the phone shot’s location.
The idea is simple: a phone photo’s coordinates can become a pin with one click, and a pin can be applied to any selection. Nothing is written to your files until you click an Apply button.
Step 1: Add both sets of files
Drag the phone shots and the camera files into the file table together, or drag in the whole day’s folder. The GPS column tells the two apart at a glance: green for the phone shots, grey for the camera files. Switch to the Side-by-Side view so the map is next to the table.
Step 2: Select the phone shot for a stop
Click the phone photo taken at the first stop. The sidebar shows its GPS coordinates.
Step 3: Click Add Pin
Click Add Pin next to the coordinates. A new pin is dropped exactly where the phone was, the map centres on it, and the pin’s section appears in the sidebar with the coordinates and the place names Apple Maps knows for that spot (Sub-location, City, Province/State, Country).
Step 4: Select the camera shots from that stop
In the file table, select the camera files taken at the same place. Cameras number their files in the order they were taken, so a stop is usually a contiguous run: click the first file, shift-click the last. The thumbnails in the sidebar confirm the selection. ⌘-click adds or removes individual files.
Step 5: Apply the pin
Click Apply next to the pin’s coordinates. The location is written to every selected file, and their GPS column turns green.
With the same files still selected, apply the place names from the pin’s section too, editing any field first if you’d rather have “New South Wales” than “NSW”; see the place-names guide. If the phone shot itself should carry the names as well, include it in the selection when applying them.
Step 6: Next stop
Select the next phone shot, click Add Pin, select its camera shots, apply. Each stop leaves a pin on the map; Navigate → Next Pin and the arrow buttons step through them.
Notes
- A stop without a phone shot can be pinned by hand: search the place in the map’s search field and use the Drop a new pin tool, as in adding locations from scratch.
- A phone shot without a location (grey icon: taken indoors, or with Location Services off for the Camera app) can’t serve as a reference; pin that stop by hand.
- Camera clocks don’t matter. Photos are matched to stops by your selection, not by time, so an unset camera clock or a wrong time zone makes no difference here.
- Videos from the camera work the same way; see adding a location to videos.