Photos from a phone usually geotag themselves. Everything else arrives with no location at all: a DSLR without GPS, a scanned print, an export that dropped its metadata, a file that came off a platform that stripped it.

Putting one back is a two-part problem. You have to know the coordinates, then write them into the file.

Part one: getting the coordinates

If you don’t already have them, the easiest source is Google Maps. Right-click any point on the map and the first item in the menu is the latitude and longitude. Click it to copy. Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap have equivalents.

You’ll get decimal degrees: 48.8566, 2.3522. Latitude first, longitude second. Negative latitude means south of the equator; negative longitude means west of Greenwich. Get the sign wrong and your photo lands in the wrong hemisphere, which is a mistake people make all the time.

EXIF stores these as degrees/minutes/seconds with separate N/S and E/W reference fields, but any decent tool converts for you. You should never have to type 48°51'24"N by hand.

Part two: writing them in

In your browser: easiest, works everywhere

Drop the photo in, click the spot on a map, download the tagged file. No install, no account, same experience on a phone or a desktop.

The thing to check: does the tool upload your photo? Most do. For a tool whose entire purpose is handling location data, that’s worth caring about. You’re sending both the image and the place it belongs to a stranger’s server.

Ours doesn’t. The file is read, tagged and saved entirely in your browser; nothing is transmitted. Open DevTools → Network and watch. That’s the sort of claim you should be able to verify rather than trust.

On Windows

Windows Explorer will show you GPS in Properties → Details but won’t let you write it. The GPS fields are read-only there. You’ll need software: GeoSetter (free, long in the tooth but works), or the exiftool command line for batch work.

On macOS

Photos.app can do it, and most people don’t know: select a photo → Get Info (⌘I) → type a place name into the location field. It geocodes it and writes the location.

Caveat: this tags the photo inside your Photos library. Whether the location travels with an exported file depends on your export settings. Check File → Export → Export Unmodified Original vs. a re-export.

On iPhone

Open the photo → swipe up for details → tap Adjust next to the location (or Add a Location if there isn’t one) → search for a place. iOS 15 and later.

On Android

Google Photos: open the photo → ⓘ Details → tap the pencil next to location → search. Same caveat as macOS: this may live in the library rather than the exported file.

Command line (batch)

For hundreds of files, exiftool is the answer:

exiftool -GPSLatitude=48.8566 -GPSLatitudeRef=N \
         -GPSLongitude=2.3522 -GPSLongitudeRef=E \
         -overwrite_original photo.jpg

Steep to learn, unbeatable once you have.

Format notes

JPEG is the easy case. EXIF lives in an APP1 segment; writing it is well-supported everywhere and touches nothing else in the file.
PNG / WebP both have somewhere to put EXIF (eXIf chunk, RIFF EXIF chunk), but support is thinner and some tools quietly skip them.
HEIC is the awkward one. It’s iPhone’s default format, and there’s no reliable way to write EXIF into a HEIC container in a browser. Nearly every tool converts to JPEG first, which re-encodes the image. Any tool claiming lossless in-place HEIC geotagging deserves scepticism. Ours converts and says so.
RAW: don’t write into the RAW. Use an XMP sidecar; that’s what it’s for.

Verifying it worked

Don’t trust the tool’s success message. Re-open the file and check:

macOS: Preview → Inspector (⌘I) → GPS tab
Windows: right-click → Properties → Details
Anywhere: exiftool -gps:all photo.jpg

If the coordinates read back and land where you expect on a map, it’s written properly.

One caveat worth repeating

A geotag isn’t proof. You just wrote arbitrary coordinates into a file, which is exactly what anyone else can do. Embedded GPS is a useful record, not tamper-evident evidence. Worth knowing before you rely on it for an insurance claim.

And if you’re geotagging because you heard it helps SEO: it doesn’t, and here’s why.

FAQ

Can I geotag a photo without GPS data? Yes, that’s the entire point. You supply the location.

Will geotagging change my photo’s quality? No, for JPEG/PNG/WebP it’s metadata only, pixels untouched. HEIC is the exception because of the conversion.

Can I geotag several photos at once? Yes, if the tool supports batch. Useful when a whole shoot happened in one place.

How precise are the coordinates? EXIF stores rational fractions to the arc-second and beyond, far more precision than consumer GPS can supply. The format won’t be your limiting factor.

How to Geotag a Photo (Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, Browser)