Geocorrelating Photos with Google Maps Timeline and ExifTool

If you enabled the location tracking feature on your Android device, you don’t even need a dedicated app to generate GPX files for geocorrelating photos. With the Location option turned on, your device quietly tracks and saves your location at all time. To enable this feature on an Android device, go to the Setting -> Location section and toggle the On switch.

Google Maps provides access to the saved location data via the Your Timeline command in the navigation sidebar. Here you can select the desired date and view the track on the map. To export the track in the KML format, click on the gear icon in the lower-right corner of the map, and choose the Export this day to KML command. Next, convert the saved .kml file to the GPX format using web-based tools like GPS Visualizer or GPSies Convert. Once you have a file in GPX format, you can use ExifTool to geocorrelate photos. On Linux, switch to the directory containing the photos you want to geotag, and run the following command (replace path/to/foo.gpx with the actual path to the GPX file):

exiftool -overwrite_original -geotag path/to/foo.gpx .

That’s all there is to it.

I write about Linux and Open Source for a living. I’m an amateur photographer, and I use Linux as my photography platform. I’m the author of the digiKam Recipes and Linux Photography books.