Photo (geotagged JPEG) (.jpg)

A geotagged photo is a JPEG that knows where it was taken. The coordinates live in the picture's Exif metadata, which makes a folder of holiday photos a track in disguise.

At a glance

History

Exif — Exchangeable image file format — was first defined by the Japan Electronic Industries Development Association, JEIDA, with the first version released in October 1995. It is maintained today jointly by JEITA and CIPA; the current version is Exif 3.1, released on 30 January 2026. GPS support is not an afterthought bolted on by one vendor: it is part of the standard.

Where it is used

Every smartphone and nearly every digital camera writes Exif, and cameras with a GPS receiver — or paired with a phone or a logger — write the GPS tags too. Photo managers, mapping sites and photo-sharing services all read them, which is how a photo ends up on a map without anyone typing a location.

Structure

Exif metadata is embedded inside the image file, structured as TIFF directories. The location sits in a dedicated GPS sub-directory, reached through TIFF private tag 0x8825, holding latitude and longitude together with the reference tags that say which hemisphere each is in, plus altitude and a timestamp when the camera recorded them. The same Exif container is also carried by TIFF, PNG, WebP, JXL and WAV files, but the geotagged photo people actually have is almost always a JPEG.

How widespread

Exif is supported by effectively every digital camera manufacturer, so this is the most widely written location format on this whole site — most of it by people who have no idea they are recording a track.

RouteConverter support

RouteConverter reads the GPS tags out of photos and writes them back, so a set of photos can be turned into a track — or a track can be used to geotag photos that have no coordinates yet. The Exif handling uses Apache Commons Imaging.

Specifications and documentation

• CIPA standards downloads (Exif)
• Wikipedia: Exif
• Apache Commons Imaging format support