Geodocs Tools
Photo Map
Drop your photos and see where each one was taken, straight from the GPS in their EXIF. Photos without a location can be placed by hand. Viewing happens entirely in your browser.
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Geodocs organizes your field data with maps, reports, and dynamic forms. Built for teams working on surveys, inspections, and geospatial projects.
Try GeodocsA photo map reads the GPS tags a phone writes into each photo — the EXIF GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude fields — and drops a pin for every photo that already carries them. Phones write GPS automatically whenever location services are on; dedicated cameras (DSLR, mirrorless) usually have no built-in GPS, so photos shot on them tend to arrive with no coordinates. Nothing is uploaded to do this — it's just reading the file, in your browser.
Most photos without GPS didn't lose it by accident — it was stripped along the way. WhatsApp, Instagram and social networks in general remove EXIF, GPS included, from every photo that passes through them; a photo forwarded through several e-mails, or a plain screenshot, carries no EXIF either, since it's a brand-new image with none of the camera's original data. The photo map doesn't guess a location for those: they land in a separate tray, and you click one and then the right spot on the map to place it by hand — just as valid as a photo with GPS.
iPhones save photos as HEIC by default, a format most browsers can't display on their own. To show these photos on the map and in the gallery, the photo map decodes HEIC in your browser, only once you drop a file of that type — the decoder (about 1 MB) is fetched only at that moment, not on page load. While you're only viewing, not a single byte of the photo leaves your computer; the conversion happens locally, and the original HEIC file stays untouched.
While you're just looking, nothing leaves your browser — the photos and the GPS read from their EXIF stay in your computer's memory, and reloading the page clears all of it. That changes the moment you click 'Save and share': the photos are then uploaded to your Geodocs account, with all the EXIF they carry — including location and the device that took the photo. That change is called out before anything is sent, so you know exactly what leaves the browser.
Saving creates an Album folder in your Geodocs workspace, with one Photo folder inside for every image — location, date and device already filled in from the EXIF. Each Photo becomes a real pin on your team's map, the same way a site inspection or field survey already works in Geodocs. After saving, you can invite people by e-mail into a read-only Viewer group, and they get the Album without touching anything else — just the photos on the map, and a report to pull together later if they want.
Which formats are supported? JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC (the iPhone default). How many photos can I load at once? It depends on your browser's memory — a few hundred usually run fine on an ordinary computer; a very large batch can slow the tab down. Does it work offline? Reading EXIF and viewing the map does, since everything runs in your browser; saving to Geodocs needs a connection, because that's when the files are uploaded. What are the direction arrows on the pins? When a photo carries the compass heading at capture time (GPSImgDirection), the pin shows an arrow pointing where the camera was aimed.