Fill In the Missing Place Names on iPhone Photos
Scenario: your files have GPS coordinates, but the IPTC city, province and country fields are empty.
This guide is for you if: your photos or videos — typically from an iPhone or iPad — show a green check in the GPS column, but the IPTC column shows a warning or a grey “no data” icon. You want to fill in the missing place names based on the coordinates that are already there.
Why this happens: the iPhone tags every photo with GPS coordinates, but does not fill in the standard IPTC fields for City, Province/State, Country and Sub-location. Apple Photos resolves the names on the fly from the coordinates, so you never notice — until you export the files to a stock agency, web gallery or archive system and they show up with blank location fields. Embedding the names into the files themselves keeps them with the image wherever it goes.
Nothing is written to your files until you click an Apply button.
Step 1: Add your files
Drag the files into the file table (or drag them onto the Dock icon, or use File → Open…). The GPS column shows a green check — the coordinates are there. The IPTC column shows grey (empty) or a warning triangle (partially filled).
Step 2: Read the suggestions
As soon as files with GPS coordinates are loaded, Media Location Tagger looks up place names for them in its built-in offline database and shows the results as greyed-out suggestions — both in the table columns and, when you select files, in the sidebar fields. Grey means: this is not yet in the file, it is the app’s best guess based on the coordinates.
The lookup is fast, works in bulk, needs no internet connection, and has no rate limits — so it works just as well for a thousand files as for ten.
Step 3: Select the files to fill in
Select the files in the table. You will usually work on many files at once, and the interface is optimized for this:
- Fields where every selected file would get the same value show that value directly.
- Fields that differ across the selection show multiple values.
A good approach for a large batch is to work location by location — for example, select all files taken in one city, apply the shared fields, and move on.
Step 4: Apply the names
For each IPTC field in the sidebar — Sub-location, City, Province/State, Country:
- click the pop-up button next to the field to see the proposed value (plus other values already in use in your batch),
- pick the one you want — or type something else entirely,
- click that field’s Apply button.
The value is written to all selected files. You stay in charge throughout: if the database proposes “Cupertino” but you want “Apple Park”, just type it. See the place-names guide for more on overriding suggestions.
Step 5: Verify
Once all four IPTC fields are filled, the IPTC column shows a green check mark for the file. A warning triangle means some fields are still missing — hover over it to see details.
Mixed batches
The same workflow handles batches that mix iPhone shots (with GPS) and pro-camera shots (without). Fill in the names for the iPhone files as above, and add locations to the GPS-less files with the map-pin workflow — you can apply the same place names across all of them.