Using a GPS tracklog to activate the Auto-Tag feature inside of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic’s Map Module is a great blessing for travel and landscape photographers. If you are working with a camera that includes a built-in GPS receiver then you don’t need a separate tracklog to get your money’s worth out of Lightroom’s Map Module. For the rest of us though, for folks like me who are still shooting with a camera body that lacks an internal GPS feature then working with Lightroom’s Auto-Tag feature and tracklog is a huge time savings.
Click here to download the images that I used in this tutorial and play along!
If your dslr camera body lacks an internal GPS feature then you have two choices. Option one: You can just drag and drop your photos onto the Map and then Lightroom will automatically create geotags for you.
The drag and drop method works fine but if you want more precision then using a GPS tracklog is a much better choice. You can save yourself a lot of work if you can record and then download a tracklog, a .gpx file, from an external device. Once you have a GPS tracklog then Lightroom can match up the GPS positions in your log with the capture times that are automatically embedded inside each of your digital images.
In today’s video, I demonstrate how to use a GPS tracklog that I created with a Garmin InReach Mini but you do not need a fancy device like my Garmin to use this part of Lightroom. You can create tracklogs using an App on your smartphone instead.
If you would like to create a tracklog using your smartphone rather than a Garmin like device then I recommend installing GPS Logger for you Android phone users or Geotag Photos Pro 2 for the iPhone crowd.
The reason why I love this feature, and the big secret that so many photographers miss, is that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic can automatically turn GPS data into searchable words for you.
If you take the time to add GPS data into your images, and if you enable the Address Lookup feature, then Lightroom will automatically type its suggestions into the country, state, and city metadata fields on each of your geotagged images. With minimal effort, Lightroom will turn your GPS data into something useful and searchable!