1
Mobile phones, many compact cameras and some other
devices have built-in satellite location technology (GPS)
and automatically add location data into the metadata of all
recorded images. For example, this photo of the Church of
St. Michael on Brentor on Dartmoor, was shot using a camera
drone that has built-in GPS.3
As long as you know where a photo was taken, it’s relatively
easy to find and add location data manually. Let’s look at
another example. Here we have a photo of Dippy the Diplodocus
that was obviously shot in the Natural History Museum in
Kensington, London; but as you can see the location metadata
fields are all empty.2 If you look more closely at the metadata panel you can
see that it includes very precise map coordinates and even
an altitude value. Using this data, Lightroom automatically adds
the information in the city, province and country fields. However,
what if your camera doesn’t have built-in GPS, how can you add
this data manually?4 To find the map coordinates for the Natural History
Museum, we need to turn to Google Maps. Such a well-
known landmark is easy to find by searching of course but the
following procedure works for any location. Simply right-click
on the location and in the context menu that appears, left-
click on the third item, “What’s here?”.Using Image
Location Data
For photographs to appear on the map of the Map Module, they need
to have satellite location embedded in the metadata. If the photo was
taken using a device with built-in GPS this will happen automatically
but how do you add location data in other circumstances?
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YOU ARE HERE: THE MAP MODULE
BDM’s Made Easy Series | Volume 22