Today’s Question: When adding photos with GPS coordinates, Lightroom Classic looks up the city/state/country, but the results are faint and in italics. Do you know of a keyboard shortcut, or other way to accept the suggestions? Currently, I am typing in the same text that is suggested.
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can apply the location metadata suggestions by clicking on the label associated with a metadata field and then clicking the text on the popup. You could then synchronize metadata for multiple images to apply the updates in batch.
More Detail: If you have the Address Lookup feature enabled, Lightroom Classic will provide suggested location information when possible for the City, State, Country/Region, and ISO Country Code fields. To enable this option, turn on the “Look up city, state and country of GPS coordinates to provide address suggestions” checkbox in the Address Lookup section of the Metadata tab in the Catalog Settings dialog.
For images that have GPS coordinates in metadata, Lightroom Classic will then use the Google Maps data to determine the name of the location for each image. When it is able to determine that location information, the name of the city, state, and country will appear in faded italic text in the applicable metadata fields. This is an indication that the metadata represent suggestions, but they aren’t actually saved to metadata.
If you have the “Export address suggestions whenever address fields are empty” checkbox in the Address Lookup section of the Metadata tab in the Catalog Settings dialog, those address suggestions will be included as metadata in the exported copies, as long as you don’t otherwise disable the export of location metadata.
If you want to apply the metadata to a photo, you can click on the label for each applicable metadata field on the right panel in the Map module, such as the labels for City and State. This will bring up a popup with the suggested location text, which you can click on to confirm. The metadata will then be included as actual metadata rather than just suggestions.
If you have a large number of images to update, you can use the Sync Metadata option to process them in batch. Start by updating one image, and then select all images that have the same location details. Then click the Sync Metadata button at the bottom of the right panel, turn on the checkboxes for the applicable location metadata fields you want to update for all selected images, and click the Synchronize button.
