Help · Places
Places does two jobs. It turns the GPS inside your photos into a town, region and country written into the files; and it gives a location to camera photos that have none, from the photos with a location taken just before and after them. You see every place before anything is written.
Nothing, until you press Write. Reading the GPS, looking up places and working out
locations from nearby photos only read your photos. Write place names into N photos adds the
town, region and country; Write locations into N photos adds a position and how sure it is. JPEG,
HEIC, TIFF and DNG get them inside the file; camera RAW files get a .xmp sidecar next to them,
so the RAW itself is not touched.
Capture dates are never touched, a location a photo already has is never replaced, and every write is one batch with an Undo, also listed in Activity under Changes written into files.
Start from Choose folders…, or from the Library: when your Library holds photos with GPS, Places offers Find their places, and when some have no location, Place the N without GPS.
Choose folders… · Find their placesFree
The photos to look at. FolioSort reads the GPS of each one and shows a line such as N with GPS · N without location · N places. Only the coordinates are sent to get a place name — never a photo — and the answers are cached on your disk.
All places · the map and the listFree
The map shows a pin for every place with how many photos were taken there; the list groups the places by country. All places at the top is everything at once. Pick a place — on the map or in the list — to see its photos.
Select all · Select none · Put them backFree
Every photo is included unless you leave it out. Click a photo to leave it out of this run, or use Select all / Select none for a whole place. The bar at the bottom counts what you left out, and Put them back includes them all again.
Write place names into N photosFree · first 100 per scan
Writes the standard IPTC and XMP place fields — city, province or state, and country — for the photos you kept in. Photos you left out are not touched, and capture dates are never touched.
Free looks up the first 100 photos with GPS in each scan, and says so on screen; Pro names every photo with GPS. When a free run stops short, Name the other N — Pro offers the rest.
Undo · See them in the Library
Undo puts back exactly what each file held before, including removing a field that was not there. See them in the Library opens the photos just written. Anything that could not be written is listed in Activity with the reason.
For camera photos that have no GPS. Most cameras record none, but the phone in your pocket did — so a camera photo taken between two phone photos was almost certainly taken where they were. The card above the map reads N photos have no location, with how many can be placed.
Review on the mapFree
Opens the proposals, grouped by day. Each row shows the photo, its time, how far off it may be (± N m) and a badge. Click a row to see the photo next to the photos it was placed from.
A photo is not placed when the photos around it are far apart, when they show you were moving (Taken on the move), or when nothing with a location was taken close enough in time. The photos with a location come from the folders you chose and from every photo with GPS your Library already knows.
Set the clock… · The clocks agree · Use these twoFree
A camera's clock is rarely the phone's. FolioSort matches them first — from the time zones both record, from matching scenes in the AI Search index, or from you. Each camera gets a line such as clock was 1 h 00 min behind your phone. If it reads clock not matched to your phone yet, press Set the clock…, pick a camera photo and a phone photo taken at the same moment, and press Use these two; The clocks agree is for when you know the camera was right. Nothing is written to the photos by this step.
Also fix these dates
When a camera's clock was off by a minute or more, this opens Dates with that shift already filled in, so the capture times can be corrected too. Nothing is written until you write it there.
Write locations into N photosFree
Writes the position into the ticked photos — JPEG, HEIC, TIFF and DNG inside the file, RAW files in a
.xmp sidecar — together with the uncertainty, so other apps can tell a guess from a fix. No
altitude is invented. A photo that already has a location is never changed; the result says how many
were left as they were. There is no per-run limit on this step.
Undo · Name these places
Undo removes the locations this run wrote. Name these places takes the photos you just placed straight into the normal Places flow, to add their town, region and country.
Which plan
Looking up place names is free for the first 100 photos with GPS in each scan; Pro names them all. Placing photos from nearby photos is not limited per run. Matching the camera's clock by scene uses the AI Search index, when there is one. See the plans.
FAQ
No. Only coordinates are looked up to get a place name — on the Mac through Apple's geocoder, on Windows through OpenStreetMap's Nominatim — and the answers are kept on your disk so the same spot is not asked twice. Placing photos from nearby photos uses no connection at all. The photos themselves never leave the computer.
Often, yes. If you also took photos with your phone that day, Locations from nearby photos places each camera photo from the phone photos taken just before and after it. Likely means it sits between two photos taken within 30 minutes of it and within 100 metres of each other; Approximate means one photo within 5 minutes, and those stay unticked until you tick them. The camera's clock is matched to the phone first.
No. A photo that already has a location is never changed, and this is checked again at the moment of writing. The result says how many already had one and were left as they were.
Free looks up place names for the first 100 photos with GPS in each scan; Pro names every photo with GPS. Placing photos from nearby photos has no per-run limit. See the pricing page for the plans.