Skip to content

Searching by location

Many photos carry the place they were taken. Anything shot on a phone, and most modern cameras, records GPS coordinates in the photo's metadata. ArchiveMind turns those coordinates into a place name during indexing, so you can find photos by where they were taken — even when the file is called IMG_4471.jpg and you never tagged anything.

How it works

While a photo is indexed, its coordinates are matched against a small map database that ships inside the app (GeoNames' list of the world's towns and cities). The nearest listed settlement becomes the photo's location — for example Lisbon, Portugal or Palm Springs, California, United States — and that name is stored in your catalogue alongside the photo.

This happens entirely offline. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is looked up on the internet; the database is on your disk, like the rest of ArchiveMind.

Searching

Type a place — a city, a region, or a country — into the search box. Photos whose resolved location matches appear in the results, marked with a GPS source chip so you can see why each one matched. Common abbreviations work too (USA, UK).

The GPS pill under the search box switches this source on and off. With it off, the same words only match file names, document text, and the other enabled sources.

The Location section

Open a photo's details and the Location section shows the resolved place, its coordinates, and two actions:

  • Search this place — runs a search for the same location, so you can jump from one photo to everything taken nearby.
  • Copy coordinates — copies the raw latitude and longitude (for example 48.6360, -1.5115) to the clipboard for use anywhere else.

What it can and cannot do

  • It finds the nearest town, not the landmark. The bundled database lists settlements, so a photo taken at a mountain, a beach, or a monument resolves to the closest town on the list — Mont-Saint-Michel resolves to nearby Pontorson, a Yosemite waterfall to the nearest listed community. ArchiveMind never claims street-level accuracy, and the Location section says so.
  • No coordinates, no location. Screenshots, scans, older camera files, images saved from the web, and photos whose location was stripped before sharing carry no GPS data. Their details say No location metadata present, and they do not appear in a location search — which is correct, not a fault. Such photos are still searchable by name, date, and what is in them.
  • Videos are handled the same way when their metadata carries coordinates; most phone videos do.