Photo Location Finder

Where does a photo's location come from?

Smartphones and cameras with a GPS receiver write the position at the moment of capture into the image file when location tagging is on. This information lives in a metadata block called EXIF: latitude and longitude are stored as degrees, minutes and seconds, along with the altitude above sea level and, on some devices, the direction the camera was facing, the capture date and the camera model. This tool reads those EXIF fields, converts the degree-minute-second values to WGS84 decimal degrees and marks each photo on the map with its thumbnail.

How to use it

1. Drag photos onto the box above, or click the box and choose them. You can add several files at once.
2. Every photo with a location tag appears on the map as a numbered marker with its thumbnail. If the file contains direction data, the orange triangle on the edge of the marker shows which way the camera was pointing.
3. The table lists the file name, date taken, latitude, longitude and altitude. Use "Show on map" to jump to a marker and "Copy" to put the coordinates on your clipboard.
4. Download all locations as GeoJSON, KML or CSV and open them in GIS software, Google Earth or a spreadsheet.

Paste a copied coordinate into the Elevation Finder to get the ground elevation at that point, or use the Distance Calculator to measure how far apart two shooting spots are.

Why is there no location?

• Location tagging is turned off in the camera app, or the app has no location permission. In that case no position was ever written to the file and it cannot be recovered later.
• Most social media and messaging apps remove EXIF data when they compress an image. Files downloaded from these apps carry no location.
• Screenshots, images exported from some editing programs and pictures resized for the web usually contain no EXIF data.
• On some phones the browser's photo picker removes the location for privacy before handing the file over. If that happens, try choosing the photo through the file manager instead of the gallery, or copy it to a computer and add it from there.
• Photos taken indoors or with a weak satellite signal may have an empty GPS field or an invalid value such as 0,0.

Privacy: removing the location before sharing

The coordinates in a photo taken at home and shared online can point straight to your address. Before sharing, check the settings below. Menu names vary with the operating system and app version.

• iPhone: In the Photos app, tap "Options" at the top of the share sheet and turn off "Location" to leave it out of that share. To stop new photos from being tagged at all, set Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera to "Never".
• Android: Turn off "Location tags" or "Save location" in the camera app's settings. Many gallery apps also offer an option to remove the location in the photo's details.
• Windows: Right-click the file and choose Properties > Details > "Remove Properties and Personal Information" to delete metadata, including the location.
• macOS: When exporting from the Photos app, leave the location information option unchecked.

Afterwards you can add the file to this tool again to confirm that the location has really been removed.

Accuracy and limitations

• The coordinate is the position of the device that took the photo, not of the subject in the picture. If someone photographs a distant mountain, it is the photographer's spot that gets recorded.
• Phone GPS is usually accurate to within a few metres under open sky; between tall buildings, in forest or indoors the error can grow to tens of metres. If the device wrote its horizontal position error into the file, it is shown in the marker popup.
• Altitude is less reliable than the horizontal position, and devices may use different reference surfaces. For ground elevation, the Elevation Finder is a more consistent source.
• Direction comes from the device's compass and can be thrown off by magnetic interference. Where the file states whether it refers to true or magnetic north, this is shown as well.
• The capture date comes from the device clock. If the time zone was written to the file, it is shown with the UTC offset; otherwise read the time as the device's local time at that moment.
• EXIF fields can be edited with dedicated software, so a location read from a file should not be treated as conclusive proof on its own.

Data and method

Files are read in your browser. EXIF fields are parsed with the open-source exifr 7.1.3 library (MIT licence), which handles the EXIF blocks in JPEG, HEIC/HEIF, TIFF and PNG files. The map uses Esri World Imagery satellite imagery and the OpenStreetMap map (ODbL licence) as basemaps. Photos and the location, date and camera details inside them are never sent to any server. While photos are processed, the only data fetched from the internet is map tiles, and the Esri and OpenStreetMap servers see nothing but the map area being viewed. If you have accepted analytics cookies, only an anonymous "location found" counter is recorded to measure tool usage. Open-source libraries used and their licences: Data Sources.

For teams collecting geotagged photos in the field

This tool is built for reading the location of individual photos. For teams that regularly collect photo observations, damage assessments or inventory records in the field, capturing the location, form data and photo together from the start gives more reliable results; see our field data collection page for that kind of workflow. Georeferencing and interpreting drone and satellite images is covered under satellite and drone image analysis.