# Need help with Locations in Maps



## gbfabiani (Mar 3, 2020)

Most photos in my Lightroom Catalog miss GPS coordinates as they were taken with DSLR missing the automatic feature. 

I am now trying to manually  add GPS data  to all my photos .( >100k photos). 
When I started checking the situation, I saw  most of my photos don't have GPS , some have ( but no Location in the Metadata), other have and also have a Location (not created by myself).


Once I added  the GPS data to some photos manually, I saw the Location ( and the City state etc) remains empty.  Is it a way when I add a Gps to have the Location filled automatically?

After that I created one Location myself, my town, and tell Maps module to add this location to the selected photos. It did work, the Location has been added, but no City, State Etc. 

Now , all pictures who are in different folders and have similar GPS coordinates remained without Location. So I have to select manually all the photos in the Area and telle maps to add Location ?

Is it any way to simly tell LR, read the GPS data already stored in the metadata and Update automatically City and State Automatically ? 
Thanks for your suggestions
giovanni


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 3, 2020)

Lightroom will not automatically *apply* the location data to images which have GPS, but it will *suggest* the location data (basically the suggestions will appear in the location fields in italics, which then have to be confirmed - or changed - by the user). To enable that process you need to enable the option to "Look up city, state and country of GPS coordinates to provide address suggestions", which you will find on the Catalog Settings>Metadata tab. Additionally, you need to ensure that "Address Lookup" (in the Activity Centre) is started, not paused. The Activity Centre dropdown is shown when you click on the down arrow which appears when you hover over the ID Plate area.


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## clee01l (Mar 3, 2020)

Take a Look at Jeffrey Freidl's . “Geoencoding Support” Plugin for Lightroom  I think it will fill in  the missing location values


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## gbfabiani (Mar 3, 2020)

Jim Wilde said:


> but it will *suggest* the location data (basically the suggestions will appear in the location fields in italics, which then have to be confirmed - or changed - by the user


I am 90% ok now with your answer! 
2 steps are  done:  I had the Look up feature enabled, but the Address Lookup was paused !
However ,  how can I confirm the suggested city is Ok , especially if I select many photos, and the Metadata panel tells me Mixed gps data ?
Thanks
giovanni


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## johnbeardy (Mar 3, 2020)

gbfabiani said:


> However , how can I confirm the suggested city is Ok , especially if I select many photos, and the Metadata panel tells me Mixed gps data ?



You can't. I've complained about this to Adobe many times.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 3, 2020)

Assuming you have a number of images from the same City, you can select all those in the Library grid (the Library Filter>Metadata>City will show "suggested" cities), then in the Metadata panel, "confirm" the suggested city on the most-selected image, and all the other selected images will also have the city confirmed. Repeat for other cities, or State/Province, or Country/Region, etc.


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## LouieSherwin (Mar 4, 2020)

clee01l said:


> Take a Look at Jeffrey Freidl's . “Geoencoding Support” Plugin for Lightroom I think it will fill in the missing location values



I found this tool much easier to use than trying to twiddle Lightroom to make permanent updates. You can select which fields are overwritten and you can easily override the suggested field value if you want. I generally make a selection in Lightroom and use the "One-by-One" option, update the location fields as I wish and apply those changes to all the selected images.

-louie


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## johnrellis (Mar 4, 2020)

For most uses, you can leave the address suggestions unconfirmed, and LR will treat them the same as if you had explicitly confirmed them. You can search them, export them, and even override individual fields (e.g. by entering a different value for Sublocation or City).  To export them, make sure the setting Catalog Settings > Export Address Suggestions is checked.

LR still has some bugs with unconfirmed address suggestions: You can't use the field values in file-renaming templates, Metadata > Save Metadata To File doesn't save them back to the file, and plugins that search the location fields will see their values as empty rather than as the suggested values:
https://feedback.photoshop.com/phot...-inconsistent-handling-of-suggested-addresses
You can quickly confirm the location fields of a batch of photos using the Commit Locations command of the Any Tag plugin (that part of the plugin is free).


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## johnrellis (Mar 4, 2020)

Also, I second (or third) the recommendation for the Geoencoding Support Plugin. But note that if you want to use Google Maps rather than Open Streetmap, you'll need to create a Google Cloud developers account and get an API key, which is tediously complicated.


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## SaraLH (Mar 6, 2020)

For years I've used a combination of Jeffrey Friedl's Geoencoding Support Plugin and the John Beardsworth's Search and Replace plugin to copy the Country, State and City values to location keywords. Couldn't live without either plugin.

In Jeffrey's plugin there is one thing that I often change and that is the language for the displayed names. For example, when I've traveled in France I want the names to show in their original language, not in the English version, so in my location name (state) I have Bourgogne Franche-Comté instead of Burgundy, and here in Germany I use the German versions of Country, State and City names. This is purely personal preference, of course.


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