Importing Locations From Photos

A photo taken with location on records where and when it was taken. Kaizora can read that from many photos at once and add each one to your Location History, which fills in years before you tracked your location any other way.

What Is Read, and What Isn’t

Only each photo’s time, position, and camera (its make and model) are read, from its metadata (Exif), on your device. The images themselves are never uploaded or kept: only a location, with its time, its accuracy, and its altitude when the photo has them, and the camera that took it, is saved to your account.

Kaizora reads JPEG, HEIC, HEIF, AVIF, PNG, and WebP photos. Videos aren’t read.

Photos Need Their Locations

A photo has a position only if location was on for the camera when it was taken:

• iPhone: Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services › Camera, set to While Using the App.
• Android: the camera app’s settings, usually an option such as Location tags or Save location.

Photos often lose their location on the way. Screenshots, photos saved from messaging apps or social networks, and edited copies exported without metadata usually have none. Phones also remove it when they hand a photo to a website or an app that hasn’t been given access to photo locations, so the most reliable source is the original files, on a computer.

Choose Photos on a Mac

1. In the Photos app, select the photos.
2. Choose File › Export › Export Unmodified Original, and save them to a folder.
3. Import that folder’s photos into Kaizora.

Export Unmodified Original keeps each file as the camera made it, location included. The ordinary Export converts the photos, and keeps their location only when Location Information is ticked.

Choose Photos on Windows

Connect your phone with a USB cable, allow access on the phone, then open it in File Explorer and copy the photos from its DCIM folder (on an iPhone, Internal Storage › DCIM). Import the copies.

Choose Photos on Your Phone

• iPhone: iOS removes the location from photos a browser takes from your photo library. Send them to a Mac with AirDrop, or open them on a computer through iCloud Photos, and import them there.
• Android: choose Browse or the file manager, then the DCIM folder, rather than the photo picker, which removes locations. Even so, some browsers on Android receive photos without their location.

If the import says most photos had no location, use a computer instead.

Import Them

1. Open Data Sources, from the account menu at the bottom of the sidebar.
2. Under Imports, find Locations from Photos and choose Import photos.
3. Under Photos, choose them: as many at once as you like, such as a whole year’s folder.
4. Check the Time Zone. Most phones record each photo’s time with its offset from UTC. For a photo without one, the time is read in the zone you choose, yours by default: choose the one you were in when you took them.
5. Select Import.

Kaizora reads the photos’ times and places, then says how many locations it imported, and how many photos it skipped because they had no position or no time.

What Comes In

Each photo with a position and a time becomes one location in your Location History, at the moment it was taken. The camera that took it, such as your phone, appears under Devices, once per camera. Importing the same photo again, or a copy of it, updates the same location rather than adding another, so it’s safe to import overlapping folders.

See Importing Google Maps Timeline for a denser history, and Add Your Places to name the places that matter.