What's the recommended workflow?

HoudahGeo is the only one-stop photo geocoding solution for the Mac. Its feature set covers the two very different workflows in photo geocoding:

Geotagging for archival: store the location the photo was taken as a means of indexing, finding, browsing, ... photos. For that you will want to get HoudahGeo in the process as early as possible. HoudahGeo's task will end with writing to EXIF/XMP to the files or the sidecar. The photo library application will read EXIF/XMP data written by HoudahGeo.

With HoudahGeo you may also tag images hosted in your favorite photo management application. When writing EXIF/XMP, you will be offered the option to write to the Aperture master / iPhoto original. Thus geotags will be carried along as you create new versions of the image.


Photo library applications cache metadata of managed photos. You need to trigger the reloading of metadata. In iPhoto, this feature is named “Rescan for Location”. In Aperture, you will use “Reload Metadata from EXIF”. Integration with Lightroom requires Lightroom to store metadata in XMP sidecar files. Once HoudahGeo has updated the sidecar, you will instruct Lightroom to "Reload Metadata from File".



HoudahGeo is able to detect photos managed by iPhoto'09 and offers to notify iPhoto of changes upon writing EXIF tags. For this feature to work, you must:

  • Use the latest version of iPhoto'09
  • Have iPhoto library pre-loading enabled in HoudahGeo
  • Choose to tag masters/originals
  • Not have HoudahGeo create copies
  • Not have HoudahGeo create XMP sidecars

Also, there should not be any existing XMP sidecars.


Publishing photos: grab a selection of your photos from iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom. The photos may have been previously geocoded or can be geocoded now. The ultimate goal is to share the photos on Flickr or Google Earth.