Work with geotags

- One of the features in this version of Photos for OS X, and this is the version that's shipped El Capitan, Mac OS X 10.11, is that we have more control over geotags now, and that is terrific, I'll tell you. So before, if a photo was already geotagged, we could see it in the Info box, and we turn on the Info box up here at the eye, and you can see that we have a pin dropped, and I can zoom in and see that this pin is dropped at New York-New York Hotel & Casino, which is correct.

That's really outstanding. And if we go to the previous photo, we'll see that I also have the pin dropped there. And then I've added it to this image too. I didn't know where it was, so then I just went with a straight Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, because it's still better to know the city if you don't know the precise location. So how does this all work? Well, let's add one, let's do it right now. Here's a spot, and all you do is go to Assign a Location, and again, we're in the Info box.

Now I'm actually at the MGM Grand when I took this photo, even though we see New York-New York here in the picture. So let's see how that works. I'm going to start typing. Las Vegas Boulevard, this one here. That's tricky, because there's a number of them, but we're at the one on Las Vegas Boulevard, so I select that. And yes, see that's correct. And if I move in a little bit, you'll see that the pin is dropped at the MGM Grand.

And then I'm up, and I'm shooting across, taking a picture of the New York-New York Hotel. Now if I wanted to, I could adjust that pin a bit. I could pick it up and move it. Say, "Well I was actually a little bit more on the walkway." And this information may change, it may not, it depends on if the computer can find another location for where you dropped the pin, if there's a name for it or not. Now we have some controls up here at Image.

Under Location, I can remove a location altogether. So we could start over by doing this. And I can revert to original location. In this case, that would be nothing, right? That won't take me back to where I moved the pin before. The original location is absolutely nothing. (laughing) Well, here, I'll show you. Goodbye, nothing. (laughing) But we can go back easy enough. Let's make sure we go to the right place.

There we go, and we'll just zoom in, just to make sure our pin is correct. All right, so we have MGM Grand identified here. I'm going to hit the arrow key, so we have New York-New York Hotel. Now all of these pictures have the keyword, Las Vegas. All right, so let's see if we can use this information for search, so we'll back out a bit. Make sure nothing is selected. So if we search Las Vegas, there we go, we get all of the shots.

Now if I search New York-New York, we get the two New York-New York shots. And let's just finish this off in style. If we do MGM Grand, there we are, just like that. So not only does geotagging help you in terms of being able to go, "Oh, oh, where was that? I can remember it now, I just got back, so I'm going to add it," but you can use it as part of search function, and being able to add this information to pictures that you take with a regular camera that doesn't have a geotagging feature.

Now I'll tell you, one tip that I like, is that if you have an iPhone with you, and you're at a spot, and you're not quite really sure what the geotag would be, take it with your iPhone, right, and then go ahead and take the rest of the shots with your regular camera. Then you can use the geodata for the iPhone shot here in Photos, look it up, right. So you would take your iPhone shot, and you'd go cmd+i, and you'd go, "Oh, that's where it was." And then what you can do, if you want, actually let's do it with a different photo here, that would be more appropriate, what you can do is then select it all right there, do cmd+c for copy, and then you can paste it.

Ta-da! Just like that. So the geotagging function of your iPhone can help you, combined with this new capability in Photos for OS X, and you can actually get the locations in your library for the places you've been.