Howto: Geotag photos in Lightroom with Google Timeline data

One feature in Adobe Lightroom that many don’t use often is the Map module. It’s really useful if your camera has GPS, if it can connect to your phone GPS, or if you manually drag images onto a map. I use the Sony “Imaging Edge Mobile” app to connect my camera to my phone via Bluetooth, but this drains the battery quickly when I’m out for a long time. It’s not ideal. If I want to use the Bluetooth remote control (not the app, the physical remote) I can’t use the location feature.

The battery life of my camera when “Airplane mode” is enabled is stellar. Not so much when using a Bluetooth connection. If I know I’ll be out for an entire day, I’ll toggle it on and off and usually remember to do it on both devices, and sometimes I even make sure to check the next image has embedded GPS data!

Google Timeline is a feature that records your location data over time, using your phone’s GPS. This data can be very useful for geotagging photos because it provides a detailed record of where you’ve been. I’ve long wondered if I could use that GPS data to geotag my photos. You can export the entirety of your location data from Google using their Google Takeout tool. If you’ve had a Google account for a long time, that file will probably be well over 1GB is size if you had location sharing enabled. Unfortunately, it’s not in a format that Lightroom understands, and may contain many years worth of location data.

A few months ago, I decided to try writing a script that convert the Google Timeline JSON data into the GPX format that Lightroom wants, but I didn’t get very far, as “real life” intruded, and it was yet another project left on the long finger. I was looking forward to a day when I had sufficient time and energy to look at it.

I’m glad I dropped it because I found someone had already created such a script, and it can consume a gigantic Records.json file. It will spit out the GPS data for any date range I want in GPX format. I discovered a Lightroom extension that makes importing that file easy, and it massages the data if a photo is taken in between points too.

The conversion script is a Python one called location-history-json-converter that can be found here. It’s relatively easy to install on Linux or macOS. If you use Windows you hopefully know how to get Python installed.

Once installed, I ran the following command to extract the GPS data I wanted for the first 17 days of May this year, and output it in the GPX format.

./location_history_json_converter.py Records.json records.gpx -f gpx -s 2024-05-01 -e 2024-05-17

That produced a nice 1.3MB file from the huge Records.json file.

The Maps module in Lightroom does allow you to import tracklogs, but I’ve used it in the past, and sometimes it missed photos, maybe because my tracklog wasn’t recording points often enough. This time I used Jeffrey Friedl’s geoencoding extension for Lightroom. The ability to adjust the timezone was critical to me, as I wanted to geoencode or geotag the photos I took on a recent trip to Greece.

I messed up the first time and told it to adjust the timezone by 2 hours, the difference between Ireland and Greece but that was an hour out, possibly because of daylight savings time settings somewhere in the mix of camera, phone and exported data. I was really annoyed with myself over that because the plugin allows you to choose only “unmapped photos”, but now every photo was mapped. 75% of them were mapped to the wrong location!

I realised it didn’t matter because the originally geotagged images were tagged off my phone, so they had the same location data as Google Timeline. I went slower a second time, picking a couple of test images of places I knew, and by adjusting the timezone by 3 hours, I saw that it worked perfectly. I ran the job again against more than 1800 images and those images were geotagged correctly.

In the past, I used a GPS logger app to log my location to my phone. That created a GPX file, but I completely forgot I had that installed and simply used the Sony app connected to my camera for a long time. The Google Timeline data is already there because I allow Google to log that data, so it’s a handy source of this information. I can attempt to geotag years worth of photos now, but I’ll have to go slow, as I know the time on my camera drifts, so that will have to be accounted for.

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