How does PhotoStructure populate the Where tag?

PhotoStructure’s Where tag root is populated automatically from GPS coordinates and location metadata in your files. There is no internet round-trip and no third-party geocoding API — everything happens locally using the geo database bundled with ExifTool.

🛰️ Reverse-geocoding from GPS

When a file has GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude, ExifTool resolves the coordinates against its bundled offline geo database (covering ~115,000 cities worldwide, population 2,000+) and produces these synthetic fields, which PhotoStructure reads first:

• GeolocationCountry
• GeolocationRegion (state / province)
• GeolocationSubregion (county / district)
• GeolocationCity

This means even photos that only have raw GPS coordinates — no city, no country in their metadata — still get a full Country/State/City hierarchy under Where.

🏷️ Falling back to explicit location metadata

If the geocoded fields aren’t available (or you’ve disabled ExifTool’s geolocation), PhotoStructure falls back to whatever explicit location strings are in the file. The full priority list is:

The full priority list is configurable via the tagGeoSynonyms setting, and the hierarchy template via tagGeoTemplate (default: Country / State / County / City / Location).

🌳 Hierarchical place tags

Place tags are hierarchical, like all PhotoStructure tags. A photo geocoded to Paris will appear under Where / 🇫🇷 France / Île-de-France / Paris. You can browse from the country level down, or jump straight to a city via search. See the hierarchical tag guide for more on how nested tags work.

Country flag emojis are added by default (tagGeoCountryFlags). The sub-city Location level only appears when the file itself carries explicit sublocation metadata — GPS reverse-geocoding stops at the city level.

❓ Photos missing from Where

If a photo has no GPS data and no explicit location metadata, it won’t appear under Where — there’s nothing to derive a place from.

If the photo does have GPS but still doesn’t appear, it may be more than 25 km from the nearest city in ExifTool’s database — the default tagGeoMaxDistanceKm threshold. You can raise that limit in settings, or set it to 0 to disable the distance check entirely.

A few options if you want untagged photos to appear under Where:

• Geotag in your photo editor. Apple Photos, Adobe Lightroom, digiKam, and others can write GPS into the file or its sidecar.
• Use a GPX track. Tools like GeoSetter and exiftool can match photo timestamps to a GPS track recorded on your phone.
• Manually add city/country metadata to the file’s XMP sidecar.

After geotagging, resync and the photos will appear under Where.

💡 Tips

• No internet required. ExifTool’s geo database is offline. Your GPS coordinates are never sent to a third party.
• Resyncing works. Adding GPS or location metadata and resyncing will reorganize the photo under Where automatically.
• Disable geocoding by setting tagGeo to false. This skips the geolocation pipeline entirely, so photos only appear under Where if they carry explicit Country, City, etc. metadata.

See also

• ExifTool geolocation documentation — technical details on the bundled geo database
• Hierarchical tags — how nested place tags are organized
• Keywords — how other location-related metadata becomes searchable

• Guides