How to Add a Location to a Video
Adding place names to a travel video by hand is the job that kills travel videos. The good news is that the information is already in your footage. The work is getting it out of the metadata and onto the frame.
Check the data is there first
Videos record coordinates only if location services were enabled for the camera when you filmed. You can check any clip in Photos: open it, swipe up on the info panel, and a map appears if the location was captured.
If it is missing, it cannot be recovered automatically. The coordinates were never written. Photos does let you set a location manually on individual items, which is worth doing for a handful of important clips but not for a year of them.
Turning coordinates into a place name
Raw coordinates are not useful on screen. They have to be resolved into something readable, a city or district name, which is a lookup rather than something stored in the file.
Dayjavu does this automatically for every clip in a compilation and prints the resulting name over that day’s footage. There is nothing to type, and days whose clips have no coordinates simply show nothing.
Doing it by hand instead
If you only need captions on a few clips, any timeline editor will do it: add a text layer per clip and type the place. That is entirely reasonable for a five-clip reel and entirely unreasonable for a year.
The automatic route is worth it at the point where you are captioning more clips than you can be bothered to type. For most people, somewhere around twenty.
Summary
- Location comes from the clip’s own metadata.
- Check it exists in Photos before relying on it.
- Coordinates must be resolved to a readable place name.
- Automatic is worth it past roughly twenty clips.
FAQ
- Why do some of my videos have no location?
- Location services were off for the camera when they were filmed, or the file was re-saved through an app that stripped the metadata.
- Does adding a location overlay share my location?
- Not with Dayjavu. The name is resolved and composited on your device, and nothing is sent anywhere. Be aware that the finished video does visibly contain the place name once you share it.
- Can I add a location to a video that never had one?
- You can set one manually in Photos for individual items, and it will then be used. There is no way to recover a location that was never recorded.