3 Steps To Geotag Photos With GPX Track Logs In Lightroom

LightroomPhoto Log
Written by Scott Davenport

I always geotag my photos. I hate looking at a photo, be it professional or personal and having to ask myself "Where was that taken?" But what if you don’t have a GPS-enabled camera? Last week I did a review of Geotag Photos Pro 2, my app of choice for tracking my location during a landscape shoot.

If you’ve got a GPS tracker or a smart phone app, you can create a GPX track log while out on a shoot. Back in the studio, it’s just a few short clicks in Lightroom’s Map module to pair your photos with the track log and automatically geotag your shots. Here's a short video on the process. I've got some screen shots below with the overview of the steps, too.

Once you have your GPX track log on your computer, jump into Lightroom's Map module. In a few clicks, you'll be all done.

Load the track log

Do this with Map > Tracklog > Load Tracklog. You can also use the track log icon in the map toolbar to load the tracklog. For multi-day trips, I wait until the trip is over and select All Tracks to tag all photos at once.

Map > Tracklog > Load Tracklog

Select the GPX track log

GPX track log loaded

Take Control of Your Lightroom Catalog

Select the photos to auto-tag

For me, I'm usually tagging all the photos from a trip, so I'll do a Cmd-A (Ctrl-A on a PC) to select all the photos.

Auto-tag the selected photos

Choose Map > Tracking > Auto-Tag Photos to pair up the selected photos with the track log. You can also use the track log icon in the map toolbar to do the pairing. 

Auto-tag selected photos

Photos are paired with the track log and geotagged automatically

 
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Scott Davenport

Scott Davenport is a landscape photographer and photo educator and based in San Diego, California. He leads photo workshops, writes photo books, hosts podcasts, makes tutorial videos, and feels weird referring to himself in the 3rd person.

He also can't help getting his feet wet photographing at the beach.

https://scottdavenportphoto.com
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