Geotag Photos Pro Alternative: What to Use Now It's Discontinued
Geotag Photos Pro stopped working in 2026. This guide covers the best geotag photos pro alternative — for GPS-track shooters and photos that were never logged.
Geotag Photos Pro was, for many photographers, the simplest way to add GPS coordinates to a whole trip without buying dedicated hardware. The mobile app — available for both iOS and Android — ran silently in the background on your phone while you shot, logging your GPS position continuously and building a timestamped track. When you finished shooting, you fed that GPX file into the companion desktop workflow, which matched each photo's capture timestamp to the nearest GPS point and wrote the coordinates into the EXIF. Two parts, one clean result. For anyone who remembered to start the app before heading out, it worked.
As of around March 2026, Geotag Photos Pro is no longer available for download from the App Store. The website is still up, but the app is discontinued and new installs are not possible. If you are reading this because you cannot reinstall it on a new phone, or because it simply stopped working and you cannot find an update, you are not alone — and this page covers what actually replaces it in 2026, both for the workflow it was built for and for the cases it never handled.
TL;DR: Geotag Photos Pro was a GPX track recorder plus EXIF writer. It is now discontinued. If you have a replacement logging setup and need a desktop tool to write the coordinates, GeoSetter (Windows, free) or HoudahGeo (Mac, around $39) are the closest direct replacements. If your problem is photos that were never logged — an old archive, a trip where the phone stayed in the bag, or images from before you had a GPS habit — RetroTagr takes a different approach entirely: AI analysis of the image content to suggest where the photo was taken, with no track file needed. The free tier covers 100 photos and 5 AI suggestions.
Why Geotag Photos Pro users are looking for an alternative
The discontinuation is recent and arrived without a migration path. Geotag Photos Pro had a loyal user base built on a genuinely useful workflow, and the absence of an official recommendation or successor from the developer leaves people with an abrupt gap and no obvious next step.
There is also a structural gap that the discontinuation has surfaced for many users: Geotag Photos Pro's approach required you to have the app running at the time you were shooting. If you have photos from before you discovered the tool, from a day the app was not running, or from a trip where the phone battery died, the GPX track simply does not exist. The track-based approach — which Geotag Photos Pro was built entirely around — cannot reconstruct a GPS log you never recorded.
So the people searching for a replacement divide into two distinct groups. The first had an active, working track-logging habit and just needs new software to replace the broken link in the chain. The second has photos that were never logged, and the discontinuation is the moment that crystallised a problem they already had: those photos have no GPS data, and no track-based tool will change that. Both groups deserve honest guidance, and the right answer is different for each.
What to look for in a replacement
If you are replacing the phone-logging side, Gaia GPS (free tier) is the most widely recommended option in 2026 for both iOS and Android — it runs cleanly in the background and exports standard GPX files. MAPic is another option. The logging part of the Geotag Photos Pro workflow is the easier half to replace.
The desktop EXIF-writing side is where the meaningful differences between tools appear. A few things worth checking before committing:
- Write-back standard. Does the tool write
GPSLatitudeandGPSLongitudeinto the standard EXIF fields that Apple Photos, Google Photos, and Lightroom read natively? All the tools listed below do. - Platform. Do you need Windows, macOS, or something that runs across both?
- Cost model. One-time purchase, free, or subscription?
- Batch support. Can it sync a whole shoot to a GPX track in one pass, or does it require photo-by-photo attention?
The track-based replacements
For photographers who log GPS tracks and need a reliable EXIF writer, two desktop tools cover most use cases.
GeoSetter is free, Windows-only, and has been the default recommendation for GPX-based geotagging on Windows for years. It reads GPX files, matches timestamps, and writes standard EXIF GPS coordinates. The interface is not polished and development has been quiet, but it does the job and it costs nothing. If you are on Windows and want the most direct replacement for the EXIF-writing half of what Geotag Photos Pro did, GeoSetter is the answer.
HoudahGeo is the macOS equivalent — a native Mac application at around $39 as a one-time purchase. It is actively maintained, handles large batches efficiently, and integrates cleanly with the Apple ecosystem. The GPX track synchronisation is more polished than GeoSetter's interface, and the buy-once pricing is genuinely appealing for a tool you return to regularly. If you are on a Mac and willing to spend $39, HoudahGeo is the stronger option. The full HoudahGeo review covers its strengths and limits honestly.
Both tools are fair substitutes for the EXIF-writing step Geotag Photos Pro provided. Neither requires a subscription, both write standard coordinates, and both handle batch processing across a full shoot. The catch is the same for both: you need a GPX track to feed them. No track, no result.
When you never logged a track: RetroTagr
If your photos have no GPS data and no GPX log, the track-based tools are not the right fit — not because they are bad, but because they were never built for this. You can open GeoSetter or HoudahGeo, but without a track file there is nothing for them to match. The map is blank and there is no starting point.
RetroTagr is built for exactly this case. Instead of reading a GPS log, it reads the photo itself. The AI analyses the visual content of each image — architecture, street signage, terrain type, vegetation, coastline features, vehicles, and identifiable landmarks — and suggests a location. Each suggestion comes with a confidence level so you can judge how much weight to give it. You accept the pin, drag it to refine the spot on the map, switch to manual picking, or skip the photo if the image gives too little to work from.
Because RetroTagr is web-based, it runs in any modern browser on macOS, Windows, or Linux with no install and no GPX file required. When the tagging is done, it writes the same standard EXIF GPS coordinates the track-based tools write — GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude — so the locations appear in Apple Photos, Google Photos, Lightroom, and any other downstream app without any format conversion. If you later use HoudahGeo for new shoots where you log a track, the coordinates from both will sit cleanly in the same photo library.
This is also the right approach for anyone working through older photos without a GPS track: the AI can suggest locations from visual content even when the image predates smartphones entirely.
The free tier covers your first 100 photos and 5 AI suggestions — enough to run a real batch of unknowns through the AI and judge the results before paying. Full pricing is at retrotagr.com/#pricing.
Side-by-side
| Decision factor | Geotag Photos Pro (discontinued) | Track-based tools (GeoSetter / HoudahGeo) | RetroTagr |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current status | Discontinued (~March 2026) | Active | Active |
| Cost | Paid (no longer available) | Free (GeoSetter) / ~$39 one-time (HoudahGeo) | Free tier (100 photos + 5 AI suggestions); paid tiers at retrotagr.com |
| Platform | iOS / Android + desktop | Windows (GeoSetter) / macOS (HoudahGeo) | Web — any browser, any OS |
| Requires a GPS track? | Yes — must record while shooting | Yes — you supply a GPX file | No — AI detects from the image content |
| AI location detection | No | No | Yes |
| Works on photos with no prior GPS log | No | No | Yes |
| Where location is written | Standard EXIF GPS | Standard EXIF GPS | Standard EXIF GPS (JPG, PNG, WebP) |
Which should you pick
If your workflow was GPS track logging and you just need to replace the broken link in the chain, the path is straightforward: pick a phone logging app (Gaia GPS is the easiest on-ramp on both platforms) and a desktop EXIF writer that matches your platform — GeoSetter for Windows, HoudahGeo for Mac. The workflow you had with Geotag Photos Pro will work again without a significant learning curve or a new subscription.
If the photos you need to geotag were never logged — old archives, an inherited collection, a trip where the phone stayed in your bag, or a library that predates your GPS habit — the track-based tools will not help regardless of how good they are. RetroTagr is built for precisely that gap. Start with the free tier on a handful of your actual unknowns to see how the AI performs on your specific images and locations. If the results are accurate enough, the rest of the archive follows. If not, you have spent nothing finding out.
Either way, the GPS coordinates both approaches write are identical in format. There is no proprietary lock-in on either side — just standard EXIF, readable everywhere.