Photos geotagged in the wrong place? Check the clock.

Updated 27 September 2026

When you geotag photos from a GPS track, the software never looks at the picture. It reads the time the photo was taken, finds that moment in the track, and uses the position recorded then. So if a photo lands in the wrong place, the GPS is rarely to blame. The time is.

How far off the photos are tells you which clock problem you have.

Off by whole hours: the timezone

GPS tracks are recorded in UTC. Your camera records the local time on its clock and, on many bodies, nothing about which timezone that was. If the software assumes the wrong zone, every photo shifts by a whole number of hours. Often that means no matches at all, because the shifted times fall outside the track.

• Newer cameras write a timezone offset alongside the capture time (the EXIF OffsetTimeOriginal field). EasyGeotag treats that as authoritative, so a folder mixing two camera bodies stays correct.
• For photos without one, set Photo timezone in the matching controls. Automatic — from track works the zone out from where the track was recorded, which is right if you set the camera to local time when you travelled.
• If you left the camera on home time while abroad, choose your home zone instead.

Off by exactly one hour: daylight saving

Most cameras do not change their clocks for daylight saving time. A body set in winter will be an hour out all summer. Correct it with a one-hour camera clock offset rather than changing the timezone.

Off by seconds or minutes: clock drift

Camera clocks drift, often by a minute or more a month, and very few photographers reset them. A few minutes of error puts a walking photo a few hundred metres down the path; in a car it can be kilometres.

The fix is a camera clock offset in hours, minutes and seconds. You rarely know it offhand, so there is a faster way:

1. At any point on the shoot, photograph your phone's clock with the camera. The phone's time comes from the network, so it is correct.
2. In EasyGeotag, choose Set From a Photo… and pick that frame.
3. Enter the time shown on the phone's screen. The app compares it with the time the camera recorded, in the photo's timezone, and sets the offset to the second.

The same offset applies to every photo from that camera on that shoot.

Some photos match, some do not: the match window

The match window is how far from a recorded GPS point a photo may be, in time, and still be matched. The default is five minutes.

• If you lost signal — indoors, in a tunnel, under heavy tree cover — and photos from that stretch did not match, widen it.
• If you were moving fast and frames snap to the wrong part of the route, narrow it.

Every photo shows how far it fell from the nearest real GPS fix, so you can tell a confident match from a guess before writing anything. Between fixes, positions are interpolated rather than snapped to the nearest point.

Still wrong? Place it by hand

For a photo with nothing recorded near it, drag it from the grid onto the map and drop it where you were standing.

Already written the wrong location?

Files modified in place are copied to a backup folder first, on by default. Choose Restore Originals to put them back, fix the clock settings, and geotag again.

Geotag five photos free. Requires macOS 15, iPadOS 18 or iOS 18.