This week MacSparky is sponsored by HoudahGeo, the Mac application that simplifies adding geolocation data to your photos.

A lot of us have fancy cameras that, unlike the iPhone, don’t automatically add geolocation data to every photo. The thing is, I like having location data attached to my photos so I can look at all the pictures I took in Chicago or Hawaii, even those taken with the fancy camera.

HoudahGeo solves that problem. HoudahGeo can add locations to photos, whether they’re in a folder on your Mac or right in the photo library, making it Apple Photos compatible.

HoudahGeo does two things for photos in your library:

• Add location information to the photo in your library. This allows Apple Photos to organize and find your photos by location. Just the same as if you had made the effort to manually assign the locations in Apple Photos

• Geotag the original image files saved to your Photos library. This updates the JPEG or RAW files that came from your camera to include GPS tags, location names, etc.*

HoudahGeo is used by travelers and professionals alike. Some use location information to organize and find photos. Others need to add GPS coordinates to photo to assess roadwork damages, to record wildlife sightings or to document environmental damages, or even document the location of a really great looking tree. There is a cool blog entry where the developer used HoudahGeo to track an 8-day hike up Mount Kilimanjaro, which explains exactly how they used the app. Using HoudahGeo you can attach location data to photos with or without a geolocation log.

Using HoudahGeo, I’m quickly able to add location data to all of my photos. Moreover, this week you can get a discount using the links in this post.

* Caveat: iCloud Photos does not re-upload modified image files. Location information added to the library gets synched through iCloud. Geotagged image files are uploaded to iCloud only if the tags were added before iCloud Photos got to uploading the files. Thus users of iCloud Photos should geotag their photos before adding them to the Photos library. For this purpose, you can use HoudahGeo instead of the Photos app to download photos from your camera. Download, geotag, add to the Photos library, and let iCloud Photos do its job.