Atlas Photo MapWhy some iPhone photos have no location, and how to fix it
You open a photo from a trip, swipe up, and there’s no map. The photo has no location. It happens for a handful of reasons, and most of them can be fixed.
Check that your Camera saves locations
This is the most common cause, and it affects every photo you take from now on.
- Open Settings.
- Go to Privacy & Security → Location Services.
- Make sure Location Services is on at the top.
- Scroll down to Camera and choose While Using the App.
- Turn on Precise Location, so photos land on the right street instead of somewhere in the area.
Photos taken while this was off won’t get their location back on their own, but you can add it by hand (see below).
Photos sent over WhatsApp lose their location
When a photo is sent through WhatsApp as a regular photo, its location and other details are stripped, so every trip photo a friend sends you that way arrives with no place attached. The same goes for most photos saved from Instagram, Facebook and other social apps.
If you want the originals with their locations, ask your friend to share them with AirDrop or an iCloud shared album, or to send them in WhatsApp as a document instead of a photo.
The sender turned location off when sharing
When you share a photo from an iPhone, there’s an Options button at the top of the share sheet with a Location switch. If it’s off, the photo is sent without its location. That’s useful for privacy, but it also means the person receiving it can’t see where it was taken.
Screenshots, scans and old cameras
- Screenshots never have a location.
- Scanned prints have no location, since the scanner doesn’t know where the photo was taken.
- Older digital cameras and many DSLRs have no GPS, so their photos come in without one.
How to add a location to a photo
You can add or correct a location by hand in the Photos app.
- Open the photo in Photos.
- Tap the More button (…), then Adjust Info → Adjust Location. On some versions of iOS you can also swipe up on the photo and tap Adjust (or Add a Location) under the map.
- Type where the photo was taken and pick the place from the list.
To fix a whole trip at once, tap Select in your library, tap all the photos from that trip, then use Adjust Location the same way. If you change your mind, the same menu has Revert, which brings back the original location.
Does a missing location matter?
For your camera roll, not much. For anything that builds on where your photos were taken, it matters a lot: the Places map in Photos, Memories, and apps like Atlas Photo Map only see photos that carry a location. Fixing the Camera setting today means every trip from now on is counted, and see how to count the countries you’ve been to from the photos you already have.
