How to Add a Location to Pictures in Photos for Mac

The latest versions of Photos app for Mac allow users to add geographic location data to any pictures stored within the image browser. This can be helpful for organizing photos, sharing with others where a picture was taken, and for later recollection purposes too. Additionally, you can edit the location of pictures as well, so if a photo was incorrectly assigned a location, you can change that in the OS X Photos app.

You’ll need Photos for OS X running on at least OS X 10.11 or later to have the location adjustment features.

How to Add a Location to a Picture in Photos for OS X

You can add locations to single pictures or multiple images, depending on what you select in Photos app:

1. Open Photos app and double-click on the photo you wish to add a location to (alternatively, you can select multiple pictures from the Albums or Photos view if you wish to apply the location to all selected images)
2. Click on the (i) button in the Photos menu bar to bring up the image info inspector window

    3. Click in “Assign a Location” and start typing the name of the location – this uses a location    

       search based on the Maps application to find* and assign locations, so select a matching location        from the search and hit “Return” to assign that location to the picture when satisfied

Once assigned, the location data appears in the Image Information panel on a map, as you can see here with a picture from the Grand Canyon:

*At the moment there does not appear to be a way to assign locations based on maps and dropping pins alone, you must use the location search feature within Photos

Once the image has been assigned a location and saved, if you export the picture the new GPS geolocation data is stored as part of the images EXIF data, meaning you can find the exact location in Preview, another Mac with Photos, or any other image viewer capable of reading location data (which is most nowadays).

This is a nice feature if you want to selectively add locations to pictures yourself rather than having the iPhone assign them though GPS, particularly if you’re one of us whodisabled iPhone GPS automatically adding geotagged locations to photos taken with the camera, or if you manually strip out GPS EXIF data of image files, which is sometimes desirable for user privacy purposes.