See Where Every Photo in Your Library Was Taken

Open any photo you took on a phone in the last decade, look at its properties, and there is a latitude and longitude sitting in the file. Your camera has been quietly recording where you stood for years.

Almost nothing lets you browse by it. You get a folder tree, or an endless scroll sorted by date, and the question you actually want to ask is "what did we shoot at the lake?"

Where the coordinates live

The data is in EXIF, a metadata block written into the image file itself. GPS latitude, GPS longitude, timestamp, camera settings. It travels with the file when you copy it, which is why a photo emailed to you can still say where it was taken.

Three things go wrong in practice.

The first is that many social platforms strip EXIF on upload, for good privacy reasons. A photo you download back from a chat app has usually lost its coordinates. Originals from your own camera roll keep them.

The second is indoor and basement shots, where the phone never got a fix. Those photos have no coordinates at all and no tool can invent them.

The third is that plenty of software just does not read the field. It is not hard to parse. It is simply not a feature most photo viewers decided to build.

What browsing by place actually needs

We built RootMap to answer the lake question, and the requirements turned out to be more specific than "put pins on a map".

Clustering, or the map is useless. Ten thousand photos from one city is a solid blob of pins. They need to collapse into counts and expand as you zoom, or you cannot see anything.

More than one basemap. Street tiles are right for a city. For a trailhead or a piece of rural property, satellite and topo tell you far more about where you were standing.

Area selection, not just clicking a pin. The real query is "everything in this general area", so you want to draw a circle on the map and filter to it.

Dates on top of place. Place alone is too broad once you have visited somewhere more than once. Week, month, three months, year, or a custom range, applied over the geographic filter.

Somewhere to put the photos with no GPS. They are still part of your library. RootMap indexes them too, searchable by filename, so the basement shots do not vanish.

The part that stays on your machine

RootMap also groups the faces it finds, so you can name a person once and then browse by who is in the shot rather than where it was taken.

Face detection is the point in a product like this where most software starts uploading. Ours does not. Detection runs on your PC, the face data never leaves it, and there is no account to create. The photos on your drive are frankly nobody else's business, including ours.

That choice costs something. On-device detection over a large library takes real time on the first pass, where a datacenter would chew through it faster. We think that is the correct trade for family photos.

Getting started

Point it at a folder. It reads GPS coordinates out of JPG, PNG, and HEIC files, indexes what it finds, and you browse from there. Once indexed you can search without rescanning. When you find the set you were after, select and export it to a folder, which is usually what you wanted anyway if you are building a photo book or sharing a trip.

It is free on the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11.

The reason we built it is boring and probably familiar. We had years of photos, we knew roughly where things happened, and scrolling was not getting us there.