Today’s Question: After reading about how much you appreciate having a camera with a GPS receiver, I have upgraded to a camera that includes this feature. Is it possible though to add location information in Lightroom Classic to existing photos that were captured with my previous camera that was not equipped with GPS?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can very easily add GPS location information to photos in Lightroom Classic by dragging the thumbnails for photos onto the map within the Map module.
More Detail: If you’re using a camera that has a built-in GPS receiver then GPS coordinates will be embedded in metadata automatically as long as the feature is enabled and a good GPS signal is received by the camera when the photos are captured. That, in turn, will cause markers for the photos to appear on the map within the Map module. However, you can still add this information later in your workflow in Lightroom Classic as well.
To add GPS metadata to photos in the Map module simply select the applicable photos on the filmstrip and drag the selected thumbnails to the location on the map where the photos were captured. If you captured a reference photo with a camera that has a GPS receiver (such as a smartphone) you could use that photo’s location as a reference. You can also use the search field at the top-right of the map to navigate to a particular area, and then pan and zoom around the map as needed so you can view the correct location on the map.
You could also copy and paste the information from the GPS field for an image that has those details to an image that doesn’t. It is even possible to record a GPS track log with a device (including a smartphone) and then synchronize that track log to photos that were captured with a camera that doesn’t have a GPS receiver. But in many cases the easiest option is to simply drag the thumbnails for selected photos directly onto the map within the Map module.
