Improve your SEO with geo tags

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Checking online, I saw quite a few tools that either were outdated, I had to pay for them, didn’t offer a real use case for my needs, or didn’t work.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:\Pictures\20210521_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.