I Wasted a Whole Afternoon Geotagging 174 Photos by Hand. Then I Built a Tool That Does It in 90 Seconds.
It was a Tuesday afternoon and I had a folder of 174 job-site photos for my rank-and-rent AC repair site. Every one needed GPS coordinates before it could go on a location page. I opened ExifTool. By photo 40 I was making typos. By photo 63 I closed the terminal and went to make tea. Here is the part I did not expect. Most of what I believed about geotagging and rankings was wrong anyway. I had…
On a Tuesday afternoon, the reporter found themselves staring at a folder containing 174 job-site photos, each needing GPS coordinates before they could be added to a location page. The process was tedious and the reporter quickly discovered the limits of manual geotagging. The reporter had previously charged clients for this service, believing it to be a ranking factor for local SEO.
However, after reading the actual tests, the reporter realized their belief was wrong. Geotagging is not a confirmed Google ranking factor and Google strips EXIF data from photos uploaded to Business Profiles. Despite this, the reporter still geotags photos as part of location hygiene for their own website. The reporter built a free tool that lets users batch geotag photos online, up to 50 images at a time, without any installation required.
This tool takes about 90 seconds to complete the task. Geotagging is mostly relevant to how Google understands image location on the website, not a lever to pull to rank. The reporter geotags every batch batch for consistency, to clean up metadata chaos, and because Bing supports geotags in image search.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
