
Check out this article for more info on which social networks remove photo metadata.Īlso, when sending or receiving photos, use iMessage, Airdrop, or Email to send the full quality image with metadata intact. Many social networks will remove photo metadata. Airplane mode may also shut off the GPS positioning. If you have any pictures in a cave, they likely don’t have a GPS position for this reason. If you’re surrounded by large buildings, thick walls, or are underground, then GPS positioning probably won’t work. For the GPS positioning to work, the phone must be able to get signal from multiple GPS satellites. If you’re on WiFi, this is enough information because companies have created databases linking WiFi networks to GPS locations, by driving around and sampling signals. To find your location, the phone needs to either use the GPS positioning, or a WiFi signal. However, if the phone can’t determine your GPS location, no photos will be geotagged. Now it seems to be able to geotag without cell reception, most of the time. It used to be that if you didn’t have cell service, it would not geotag (although GPS should only rely on satellites). The iOS camera app does the best it can, and it has been improving. Nonetheless, sometimes the geotagging fails.

With this enabled, every picture you take in the built in Camera app _should_ be geotagged. In the Settings app, you have to go into Privacy -> Location Services and enable Camera (it should say “While Using the App”).

Of course, to enable geotagging of pictures taken by the iPhone Camera app, you have to have the correct settings. Here I’ll talk about why this may be, and how to find and fix the issue.

Now that geotags are so common, it can be upsetting to see that some pictures don’t have them when they should.
