I’ve been aware of the importance of geolocalization for a while. After a short talk with another photographer, I realized that I didn’t give enough value to them for my headshot business. Located in Vancouver where there are multiple headshot photographers, it doesn’t matter that I’m an expert on the subject, others will rank higher than me because of their referrals, backlinks, etc.
I agree that for personal pictures or things, having this information is a privacy issue, but for a business, it can help people find you. For example, if someone searches headshot images, google will show images that are closer to your location (ok, there are more things involved on that part, but there is value on the geotag).
Checking online, I saw quite a few tools that either were outdated, I had to pay for them, didn’t offer a real use case for my needs, or didn’t work.
One common denominator for some of those tools was the use of ExifTool, a command-line tool for EXIF manipulation. I spent some hours reading the documentation, checking the forums and I decided that would be the best tool for my needs, just wrap it on a small script and we good to go.
ExifTool allows you do what I’m doing here with the command line easier, just use * or the CSV argument for a more granular command. Still, let me show multiple examples of how to use ExifTool and my script to allow a more data driven approach.
exiftool -GPSLongitude="49.202518395199945" -GPSLongitudeRef="49.202518395199945" -GPSLatitude="-122.91876150352081" -GPSLatitudeRef="-122.91876150352081" D:\Pictures\20210521_Ashley\*That command would just apply the coordinates of your business to all images in a folder. Another thing that you may have noticed is that exiftool detects the “Ref”, meaning North/South/West/East thanks to the sign on the number.
Now, lets go with the script, you can check it here https://github.com/raistmaj/QuickTag
The script needs a data file and an input folder:
python .tag.py --input 'D:Pictures20210521_Ashley' --file 'meta.json'Checking the meta.json file you can see what is doing:
{ "GPSLongitude": "49.202518395199945", "GPSLongitudeRef": "49.202518395199945", "GPSLatitude": "-122.91876150352081", "GPSLatitudeRef": "-122.91876150352081" }This approach is beneficial so you just need to keep your file with the tags you want to add to the image and run it.
Another future update is to include custom tags in a configuration file so we can define ours on XMP EXIF values.
Why geotags matter for a photography business
The reason this is worth automating comes down to how people find a photographer. Someone searching for a headshot photographer is almost always searching locally, and the signals that tell a search engine where you operate add up from a lot of small places, your listing, your reviews, the addresses on your pages, and the metadata attached to the images you publish. A geotag on a photo is one more quiet vote for where you are. On its own it will not lift you past a competitor with more reviews and better links, but it is free, it is under your control, and there is no reason to leave it blank.
The privacy trade off is real and worth stating plainly. For personal work, stripping location data is the right call, you do not want the coordinates of your home or a client’s home riding along in a file you share. For business images tied to a studio address you want to be found at, the logic flips, and tagging them helps rather than hurts. The script above just makes it painless to apply the right coordinates to a whole folder at once, so doing the correct thing is faster than skipping it. That is usually the only way a small habit like this actually sticks.