View and Assign Locations to Photos and Videos

Now let’s take a look at how we can view the location of our photos and videos in the Photos app on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m in my Photos app here, and if we go to our sidebar on the left, you’re going to see we have Places. When I click on Places, it’s going to show me all of my photos placed on the map.

Now there’s going to be one catch to this. The photo does have to have GPS location embedded in it as metadata. Any photo that you take with your iPhone is going to have the location embedded in it. So if you’ve taken most of your photos with an iPhone, you’ll be able to view them on the map here.

So we can see that I have about 50 photos from Colorado. I have about 25 photos from Florida. Now, what I can do is click on this and then it’s going to show me all 25 of those photos. So here I can scroll up and down to view all of those photos to go back. I just click on the left arrow and it takes me back.

I can also zoom in and out of this map. So now I just go back down over here and let’s zoom in here. You’re going to see it’s going to start splitting them up. I have some from the Miami area. I have some from Cape Canaveral. And then I also have some from Disney.

Now I mentioned that the photo does have to have GPS location embedded in it as metadata. We can add that location metadata to photos that do not have it and we can also move the location of a photo. To do that, we go back over to our Library. We find the photo that does not have GPS location in it. I have this photo here. This is from Epcot. It does not have any GPS metadata in it. So I select it, and then what we do is we go up to the i. The i is where we can view all of the different metadata. When I click on this, we have a new window that opens up and we can see it was taken with my Panasonic camera. The Panasonic camera does not have a GPS chip in it. So it did not mark where the photo was taken. If we look, you’re going to see down at the bottom, we have Assign A Location. So now all I need to do is just click in here and I could easily just type in Epcot and the Photos app will search for that result. And now all I need to do is just click on this and I just assigned that photo to Epcot. So now, if I were to go back over to my places here, it would show up in my places.

Now I mentioned that we can also move this. Right now this has just assigned to Epcot in general, but actually this is in the land of Mexico. So I want to move this. Well, the first thing we need to do is zoom in here a little bit to get a more precise location. Mexico is right around here in Disney. So what I need to do is move that pin here over to that location. So now I just click and drag, it picks it up, and I place it where I want. So I’m going to go right about here. And we can see it still says Epcot, but now it has placed in a better location, closer to where the photo was actually taken. Once I made all my changes, all I need to do is close this.

Now, if you have moved the location of a photo and you want to revert it to the original location, like what I did here, all you have to do is just make sure that the photo is selected. And then you go up under Image. We go over to Location. And you select Revert to Original Location.

The last thing I want to mention as we can also hide the location. When we hide the location, it will hide the location from the Photos app. So it will not show up in the maps, but it will not remove that metadata from the photo. So that metadata, that GPS location, is still going to be in the photo itself or the video itself. It’s just not going to show in the photos app on the map. If you do hide it, you can also unhide it by selecting this.

So that’s how we can view the location of our photos in the Photos app. If the photo has the location, the GPS metadata embedded in it, any photo taken with an iPhone will, all you have to do is just go over to Places in the sidebar, and you’ll be able to see all of your photos mapped out in a map. If you zoom into a certain location, you also get better detailed where the photos were taken. Click on any one of the photos on the map, and you’ll be able to see all of the photos from that location to assign or change a location in a photo. All you have to do is just select the photo and then go up to the i to view all of the metadata. If it doesn’t have any location information, you can assign a location, just start typing in the location name. And if it does have a location, if you want to move it, you can click and hold on the pin to pick it up and then drop it where you want the new location to be.

So that’s how we can change and view the location of photos and videos and the Photos app on the Mac.