A trip is missing from your photo map, even though you took plenty of pictures. Before importing everything again, check one of those photos: does it actually contain a location, and can the map app access it?
For future pictures, the setting you need belongs to the camera. The Photos or Gallery app is where you check the result. Enabling camera location saving today does not recover coordinates that were never recorded in older pictures.
iPhone: enable location access for Camera
- Open Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services.
- Turn on Location Services if it is off.
- Select Camera, then choose While Using the App.
- Enable Precise Location if you want specific rather than approximate photo locations.
These are the controls described in Apple’s location-permission guide. If you take pictures with another camera app, check that app’s permission too. The relevant permission is for the app taking the picture.
Take a new photo, open it in Photos, and swipe up or tap the information button. Look for a map or address. Apple explains how to inspect a photo’s information.
Android: check permission and location saving
Android menu names vary by manufacturer, camera app and software version. There are two settings to check.
First, turn on the phone’s Location setting. Then touch and hold the Camera app icon and open App info → Permissions → Location. Allow location access while using the app. If offered, enable Use precise location for more specific coordinates. See Google’s Android permission instructions.
Next, open the camera’s own settings and enable photo location saving:
- Google Pixel: look for Save location.
- Samsung Galaxy: look for Location tags.
- Other Android phones: the option may be called Save location info, Store location data or something similar.
Google lists these manufacturer-specific names in its camera location settings guide. If the switch is unavailable, revisit the camera permission first. Avoid assuming a menu path from a different phone will match yours exactly.
Take a new picture and inspect its details in your gallery or Google Photos. Check for a location and whether it came from the camera. Google Photos can also show an estimated or manually added place; that alone does not prove the original file contains camera-recorded coordinates. Google explains these different sources of photo locations.
Use one test photo to narrow down the problem
Choose a place you recognise and take a fresh picture after changing the settings. Use the original camera image for your test, rather than a screenshot or a copy sent through a messaging app.
- No location in the new photo: recheck the permission for the camera you actually used and, on Android, its location-saving switch.
- Location present, but the photo is missing from Unshade: check whether that photo is among the images you allowed Unshade to access. Photo-library access and the camera’s location permission serve different purposes.
- New photo works, old trip still missing: examine an original picture from that trip. Today’s settings cannot tell you whether location saving was enabled back then.
Once the test picture has a saved location and is available to Unshade, use the photo import and inspect the corresponding area of your map. Our photo travel map setup guide explains the overall process.
What can you do about older photos?
Start with the original files if you still have them. A shared copy may not carry the same metadata. If an original never had coordinates, switching on location services now cannot reconstruct the missing capture location.
If you know where a picture was taken, some photo apps allow a location to be added manually. Try one image first and check whether your travel-map app can read that change before editing a whole holiday. A place shown inside a photo service is not a guarantee that the location will transfer with the image to another app.
Think of two separate checks: is the location saved, and is this picture available to the app? Those questions are a more useful starting point than repeatedly importing the entire library. Visit Unshade when you are ready to explore the places in your geotagged photos.