Locations from a Track

Place photographs that have no location by matching their capture times to a route you recorded.

Tracks. On iPhone and iPad, Health Workouts reads workouts with a route from Apple Health when you ask; Frames requests permission the first time. Health is unavailable on Mac, which shows the Health tracks your other devices added. On every device, Add Track… accepts GPX, FIT and KML files. On Mac you can also drop a track file onto the stage. Opening a track file with Frames from Files, AirDrop or Finder adds it to your tracks, and a note says so. With Library Sync on, a track added on one device appears on the others.

The stage. The Location stage shows your tracks in a list, their routes and the photographs on a map, and a timeline that draws each track’s span against the photographs’ capture times. Tracks overlapping those times are selected when the stage opens. The same stage appears in card import and after import.

The camera clock. A camera set to the wrong time or time zone places photographs at the wrong point on a route. Drag the photographs along the timeline, or use the Camera clock stepper and field, to adjust their times by up to 14 hours either way. The adjustment applies to this batch alone and never changes a photograph’s capture time. When most photographs miss the selected tracks, Frames suggests the adjustment that places the most, shown as Use …; click it to apply it.

The counts. Four counts sum up the match: Placed, Outside Tracks, Already Located and No Capture Time. Click a count to see its photographs.

What is matched. A photograph’s position is read between the two track points recorded either side of its capture time. A photograph more than two minutes before a track begins or after it ends stays without a location, and so does one taken during a gap longer than five minutes in which the route moved. A photograph with recorded GPS, or a location already set, keeps that location.

At import. With Apple Photos as the destination, each placed photograph arrives in Photos with its location. With a folder destination, the location is written into the photograph’s .xmp sidecar and the RAW file stays unchanged; Frames adopts the location when the folder is catalogued.

After import. On Mac, choose Photo › Add Locations from Track… for the selection, or for the current collection when nothing is selected. On iPhone and iPad, choose Add Locations from Track from the selection’s More menu or a photograph’s long-press menu. In Journey, Without Location offers Find on a Track…. Frames first reads any recorded GPS it has not read yet; photographs whose location cannot be read are counted and left alone. Place N sets every location in one act, and ⌘Z on Mac removes them together.

Placed locations. A placed location is a correction, stored in Frames’ catalogue. On Mac, Info’s Metadata › Capture shows the location with Placed from and the track’s name; Restore removes it. Placed locations travel to your other devices with Library Sync; Apple TV receives them and adds no controls for them. Exports include them only when the export’s Location metadata switch is on.

Settings › Tracks lists every track with how many photographs it placed. That count covers locations placed after import and card imports into folders; a card import into Photos writes the location into the photograph itself, so those photographs are not counted. Rename or remove a track, remove them all with Remove All Tracks…, or add one with Add Track….

Privacy. A route records where you went between leaving home and coming back. Tracks stay in your catalogue and, with Library Sync on, in your private iCloud. Removing a track removes it from every device and keeps the locations it placed.