MacMost Q&A Forum • View All Forum QuestionsAsk a Question

Can I Create a Custom Location In Photos?

I have hundreds of family photos taken at my mother’s house, or sister’s, or mine. Many of the photos are coming from scans of paper photos, so GPS info is not available. It would be a cool feature to be able to find my address in the location field, and then rename that specific spot to be ‘Cindy’s House’. Then, for new photos, I would enter ‘Cindy’s House’ in the location field, rather than having to search for my address every time I wanted to use that location. Is this possible?
—–
Cindy

Comments: 4 Responses to “Can I Create a Custom Location In Photos?”

    8 years ago

    You can definitely set the GPS location manually, but not quite the way you want. Just bring up the photo in the Photos app on your Mac, use Command+I to get info on it, and then you can either type in the Location field or drag and drop the pin on the map to set the location.
    Using a location like "Cindy's House" won't work. You need to use a map location like the name of a town or landmark. But you can also use a street address. That's probably the quickest way to assign the photo to an exact location. It will change the location to something more general like "Denver, Colorado" but the pin on the map will be precise.
    You can still use the map view in Photos to find all of the photos taken in that precise location. This avoids issues like if you take a photo near the fence of your property and your iPhone assigns it to the neighbor's address. Using the map will clearly show they are all at the same location.
    If you want to be able to search for something like "Cindy's House" in Photos, just assign that as a keyword to that entire group of scanned photos. That way you can search for that term. Searching is great because it won't care that it is a keyword and not a location -- it looks for both as well as title and other bits of information.

    Cindy
    8 years ago

    I realize I can't search for 'Cindy's House'; that would be utterly meaningless to Maps. What I was trying to do is FIRST, search for my address (i.e., 123 Main Street, City, State) in the Info/Location field. Then, once it's found, I 'name' that location so that Photos now knows that 123 Main Street is Cindy's House. Then, the next time I want to place a photo at that address, I type 'Cindy's House' in the location field instead of having to once again search anew for the address.

    8 years ago

    I understand. But it doesn't work like that. You'll need to use the address only. Think of it as a hug pull-down menu where you can only select items that are already in Apple Maps. You can't add custom ones. The end result is an actual GPS location anyway.
    Then, my suggestion is to put "Cindy's House" in the keywords field for searches if you like.
    BTW, you don't need to do this for every photo. Just select all of the photos that you want to assign to the same location, use Command+I and assign the location (and keyword if you like) to them all at once.

    Leah
    8 years ago

    I've often thought that Photos should be able to search for information in your Contacts app -- the way the Maps and Mail can. A third-party text replacement app such as TextExpander lets you create a snippet of text that expands into the full address (or whatever text you specify) whenever you type the snippet. Unfortunately, that's an expensive solution!

Comments Closed.