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 proposed names
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 proposals — 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 — usually all of them, with ⌘A (or shift-click and ⌘-click for part of the batch; details). There is no need to work town by town: every file carries its own proposals, and the next step writes each file’s own names, so one selection spanning three cities is fine. (In the sidebar, a field whose proposals differ across the selection says n proposed values; that is expected.)
Step 4: Apply the proposed names
Choose Location → Apply All Proposed IPTC Location Tags, or right-click the selected files (two fingers on a trackpad, or Control-click) and choose it from the menu that appears. Sub-location, City, Province/State and Country are written into every selected file, each file with its own names: the photos from Cupertino get Cupertino, the ones from San Francisco get San Francisco.
The command fills in blanks only. A field that already holds a value is left as it is, and files that had all four names already are skipped — the status line at the bottom of the window tells you how many. If a batch arrives with stale or wrong names already in the fields, hold ⌥ while the Location menu is open and the command becomes Overwrite with All Proposed IPTC Location Tags.
To fill in one field at a time, use Apply Proposed City and its siblings in the same menu, or click the Apply button next to the empty field in the sidebar, which applies that field’s proposal in the same per-file way. Applying the proposed place names describes all the options.
Step 5: Correct what you disagree with
You stay in charge throughout: if the database proposes “Cupertino” but you want “Apple Park”, select the files concerned, type the name into the field and click its Apply button — typed text goes to every selected file. The pop-up button next to each field offers the proposed value and the values already in use in your batch, so a name can also be picked rather than typed. See the place-names guide for more on overriding proposals.
Step 6: 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.