Today’s Question: I have enabled the option to show “address suggestions” showing the name of location based on GPS metadata for my photos. But how do I take those suggestions and make them permanent? When I click in a field such as “City” the suggestion disappears.
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can make address suggestions for location metadata permanent by clicking on the label for the metadata field and clicking the suggestion on the popup that appears. Note that you can also have this information automatically added to copies of photos upon export.
More Detail: For photos with GPS coordinates embedded in metadata you can have Lightroom Classic display the city, state, and country (as applicable) as metadata suggestions. That information can then be made permanent for your source photos if you’d like and can also be included automatically in exported copies of photos that include those location suggestions.
To see the address suggestions in the first place you need to enable the feature in the Catalog Settings dialog. Start by choosing Edit > Catalog Settings from the menu on Windows or Lightroom Classic > Catalog Settings on Macintosh. On the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings dialog turn on the “Look up city, state and country of GPS coordinates to provide address suggestions” checkbox. If you want to be able to include those suggestions in metadata automatically when exporting photos you need to also turn on the “Export address suggestions whenever address fields are empty” checkbox.
If you want to make the address suggestions permanent for a photo browse the location metadata, which you can get to quickly by choosing Location from the popup to the left of the Metadata heading on the right panel in the Library module. Address suggestions will appear as italic text in the various fields, such as City, State, and Country/Region. To apply a metadata value permanently click on the label to the left of the field (such as “City”) and click on the address suggestion text in the popup that appears.
Even if you have not made address suggestions permanent in the metadata for photos, you can still include the address suggestions in metadata for exported copies for your photos. As noted above, you’ll first need to turn on the applicable checkbox in the Catalog Settings dialog. You’ll then need to choose “All Metadata” from the Include popup in the Metadata section of the Export dialog, and make sure that the “Remove Location Info” checkbox is turned off.
