What Is Geotagging? Photo Location Metadata Explained (2026)

Applies to macOS Ventura through macOS 26

The short answer: a geotag is the place a photo or video was taken, stored inside the file as metadata. It has two layers: the GPS coordinates (latitude, longitude, usually altitude), and optionally the place names (sub-location, city, state or province, country). Phones write the coordinates automatically. Most dedicated cameras write nothing. Photo apps read whatever is there, show a place name they look up on the fly, and, this is the part that trips people up, often store locations you add or change in their own database rather than in the file.

A disclosure: I’m the developer of Media Location Tagger, a paid Mac utility for reading, adding and fixing exactly this metadata. This article is the explainer; the how-tos it links to cover the free routes first.

Two meanings, one word, before we start. On Instagram or Facebook, “geotagging” a post means attaching a place label to it, a bit of text the platform stores. That label has nothing to do with the file. This article is about the other meaning: the location metadata embedded in the photo or video file itself, which travels with the file wherever it goes.

What a geotag actually is

Every JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, RAW file and most videos carry a block of metadata alongside the image data. The location lives in three places within it:

• EXIF GPS (photos). A group of tags with the latitude, longitude and their hemisphere references, plus, when the device knows them, altitude, the direction the camera was pointing, speed, and a GPS timestamp in UTC. This is what an iPhone, a GoPro or a drone writes at the moment of capture.
• QuickTime location (video). MOV and MP4 containers don’t use EXIF; they store one combined coordinate string (ISO 6709 style: +48.8584+002.2945/) in the container’s metadata. iPhone videos keep it in two different places at once, an old one and a new one, which is why some tools see the location and some don’t.
• IPTC and XMP place names. Sub-location, City, Province/State and Country as text, in the IPTC fields that newspapers and stock agencies have used since the 1990s, and mirrored in a modern XMP packet. Nothing writes these at capture time. They are added afterwards, by a person or by software that looks them up from the coordinates.

So “does this photo have a location?” is really two questions: does it have coordinates, and does it have names. A typical iPhone photo has the first and not the second. A typical photo from a Sony, Fujifilm or Nikon body has neither.

Where the location comes from, device by device

• Phones: coordinates on every shot, as long as the Camera app has Location Services access. Precision is a few metres outdoors, worse indoors, and occasionally wildly wrong when the phone had no fix and used the last known position.
• Dedicated cameras: most write nothing. A few bodies have a built-in receiver (some Canon DSLRs and the EOS R3, a handful of older Nikons). Everything else relies on a Bluetooth link to the maker’s phone app (Canon Camera Connect, Nikon SnapBridge, Sony’s Creators’ App, Fujifilm XApp and so on), which only works while the app is running and connected, and which is the first thing to silently drop out on a long day. The geotagging how-to has a maker-by-maker table.
• Action cameras and drones: usually yes, with altitude and direction.
• Scans, screenshots, AI-generated images: never. There is nothing to record.
• Edited exports: it depends on the editor and its export settings. Most keep the original EXIF, including GPS; some strip it; the export dialogs in Photos and Lightroom have a checkbox for it.

How to see a photo’s location on a Mac

You don’t need any extra software to find out whether a file has coordinates and what they are:

• The Finder. Select the file, press ⌘I for Get Info, and expand More Info. If the file has GPS data, latitude and longitude are listed there.
• Preview. Open the photo, choose Tools ▸ Show Inspector, and click the GPS tab. It shows the coordinates, altitude and a small map, with a Show in Maps button and, usefully, a Remove Location Info button.
• Photos. Select a photo and press ⌘I. The Info panel shows a map if there is a location, and an Assign a Location field if there isn’t.
• ExifTool, the free command-line tool everything else is built on, shows every location field at once, including the IPTC names and both copies of a video’s coordinates:

exiftool -gps:all -iptc:all -xmp:all -quicktime:all -a -G1 photo.jpg

The same methods answer “where was this photo taken?” for a file someone sent you, provided the location survived the trip. Messaging apps and social networks strip it from the copies they pass on; email and AirDrop keep it.

Coordinates versus place names: the part everyone gets wrong

Open an iPhone photo in Photos and it says “Bennelong Point, Sydney”. Look inside the file and there is no such text anywhere. What the file contains is a pair of numbers; Photos turned them into a name a moment ago by asking Apple’s map servers, and it will do so again next time. The same goes for the Places view in Photos, the map in Google Photos, and the italic suggestions in Lightroom’s Metadata panel.

That’s fine as long as the file stays in that app. It stops being fine the moment the file goes anywhere that reads the fields rather than the coordinates: a stock agency’s upload form, a newspaper’s picture desk, a digital asset management system, a client’s Lightroom catalogue, a web gallery that shows “City, Country” under each image. There the location is blank, because nobody ever wrote it into the file.

Writing the names into the IPTC fields is a separate step from the coordinates, done after the fact, and it is the step that makes a location portable. It also gives you control over the wording: the file can say “New South Wales” or “NSW”, “Bennelong Point” or “Sydney Opera House”, in your language or the local one, and it will say the same thing in every application.

Where apps keep the location: in the file or in their database

This is the single most useful thing to understand about photo locations, and the cause of most “my photos show a location here but not there” confusion.

• Apple Photos keeps everything it knows about a photo, including a location you assign or change in the Info panel, in the library database. The original file is not modified. When you export, Photos writes a copy, and only that copy carries the assigned location, and only if the Location Information checkbox is on. Export the unmodified original and you get the file as imported: if the camera didn’t write a location, the export has none, whatever Photos was showing.
• Lightroom Classic likewise keeps locations you set in the Map module in the catalogue. They reach the file only when you save metadata to file (⌘S in the Library module, or the Automatically write changes into XMP catalogue setting), and for proprietary RAW formats they go into an .xmp sidecar file next to the RAW rather than into the RAW itself.
• Google Photos, Amazon Photos and other online libraries: an edited location lives on their servers. Download the file and you get whatever was uploaded.
• Dedicated metadata editors (ExifTool, the free GeoTag app, Media Location Tagger) write into the file. That is their whole point: the location is then visible to every application, survives every export and backup, and is still there in twenty years when the app you used is gone.

Neither approach is wrong. Database-only is convenient and reversible; in-file is permanent and portable. What matters is knowing which one you are doing, so that the day you switch photo apps, hand files to a client, or restore originals from a backup, the years of location work come with them.

Why your photos show no location, or the wrong one

The usual causes, with where to go next:

• Your camera doesn’t record GPS. The most common case for DSLR and mirrorless owners. The files have no coordinates and no names; nothing in Photos or Lightroom will sort them by place until you add a location. → How to geotag photos on a Mac
• The photos have coordinates but the place fields are empty. iPhone photos after export, in any tool that reads IPTC. → Fill in the missing place names
• The location is wrong. A manual location left set in the camera from a previous trip; a bad GPS fix; coordinates that were typed with the wrong hemisphere sign and put the shot in the middle of the ocean. → Fix the location on photos
• The location was there and is gone after export. Check the export settings of whatever wrote the copy; see the section above.
• Photos says “Looking up location info…” forever. That’s a Photos database or network issue, not a problem with the file; the coordinates are still in it.
• It’s a video. Many image-centric tools don’t read the QuickTime fields. Look with ExifTool or a video-aware editor.
• Two apps show two different locations for the same file. The legacy EXIF/IPTC copy and the XMP copy disagree, usually after one tool updated one and not the other. Media Location Tagger flags this per field; ExifTool’s -a -G1 output above shows both copies side by side.

What a geotag gives away

The coordinates in a photo of your dog in the back yard are your home address, to within a few metres. Anyone the file reaches can read them with the methods in this article. Before sharing, strip the location from the copies you send, or replace the exact position with a vague one; the remove-metadata guide covers the free routes and the batch tools, and the difference between stripping everything and stripping just the location.

Which tool does what

FAQ

What is a geotag on a photo? The GPS coordinates, and optionally the place names, stored as metadata inside the image file. It’s written by the device at capture time (phones, drones) or added later with software.

Do all photos have location data? No. Phone photos almost always do; photos from most dedicated cameras don’t; scans and screenshots never do; and shared copies often had it removed by the platform in between.

Can you get GPS coordinates from a picture? If they are in the file, yes: Preview’s Inspector (GPS tab), the Finder’s Get Info, or ExifTool show them. If they aren’t, no software can recover them; tools that “find where a photo was taken” from the image content are guessing from landmarks, not reading metadata.

Why does my DSLR not record location? Most camera bodies have no GPS receiver. Makers offer a phone-app link over Bluetooth instead; it works when it works. Adding locations afterwards on the Mac is the reliable fix.

Is geotagging the same as tagging a location on Instagram? No. Instagram’s location is a label on the post, stored by Instagram. A geotag in this article’s sense is data inside the file. Instagram strips the latter from the copies it serves and keeps the former.

Does a photo’s location change if I edit the photo? Editing pixels doesn’t touch metadata, but exporting might: check the export dialog’s location checkbox. Cropping, colour and retouching leave the geotag alone.

What’s the difference between EXIF and IPTC location? EXIF holds the numbers (coordinates, altitude, direction) written by the device. IPTC holds the words (city, state, country, sub-location) written by people or software afterwards. Both are needed for a location that is both precise and readable everywhere.

Frank Reiff is the developer of Media Location Tagger and A Better Finder Attributes, Mac file-management utilities in continuous development since 1996. Related: How to geotag photos on a Mac, How to remove metadata from photos, or get in touch with a location-metadata problem this article doesn’t cover.