How to import a GPX file into Lightroom

The short answer

In Lightroom Classic, open the Map module, open the Tracklog menu, and choose "Load Tracklog…" to bring in a GPX file. The track draws itself across the map. Select the photos taken during that walk in the filmstrip, go back to the Tracklog menu, and choose "Auto-Tag Photos" (or "Auto-Tag Selected Photos"). Lightroom compares each photo's own capture time against the timestamps on the track and writes the nearest matching coordinate into that photo's metadata.

This is a feature of Lightroom Classic, the desktop application. The cloud-based Lightroom does not have a Map module or tracklog support, so a GPX file has nothing to be loaded into there.

Why this exists at all

Most dedicated cameras — DSLRs, mirrorless bodies, plenty of compacts — have no GPS chip built in. A phone recording a route the whole time, meanwhile, produces exactly the kind of file this problem needs: a continuous list of coordinates with a timestamp on each one. Tracklog matching is a way of borrowing that record for photos that were never able to tag themselves, so a shot taken on a proper camera ends up with the same kind of location data a phone photo gets automatically.

The step that actually decides whether this works

A GPX timestamp is written in UTC by convention. A camera's clock, unless someone specifically set it otherwise, is set to local time. Lightroom has to be told the difference between the two before it can line a photo up with the right point on the track, and it asks for this — usually as a time zone offset — when you load the tracklog or run auto-tagging for the first time. Get that offset wrong by even one hour and every single photo lands on a real point on the track, just the wrong one, often somewhere a few minutes' walk from where it was actually taken.

The safest way to avoid the problem is to check your camera's clock is set to local time before a hike, the same way you would before travelling across time zones, and to confirm the offset Lightroom proposes matches where you actually were rather than accepting a default.

What auto-tagging needs to be true

• The photo's capture timestamp has to fall inside the time range covered by the track. A photo taken before recording started or after it stopped has nothing to match against.
• The camera's clock and the recording device's clock have to be reasonably close to each other. A camera clock that has drifted by several minutes over weeks without being reset quietly shifts every match along the route.
• The track has to actually cover the stretch in question. A gap from a pause, or from GPS being lost for a while, leaves nothing for a photo taken during that gap to match against — Lightroom borrows the nearest surviving point instead, which is a guess, not a fix.

What this does and does not fix

Auto-tagging writes a real GPS coordinate into a photo's own file, the same field a phone camera fills in on its own — from that point on, any app or website that reads photo metadata sees a located photo, not a guess layered on top in Lightroom's own catalog. What it cannot do is recover a walk that was never tracked in the first place, or place a photo more precisely than the track itself was recorded. A track with a point every few seconds gives a tight match; a sparser one gives a rougher one.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records a route with GPS the entire time you are out, and exports it as a GPX 1.1 file — a single hike or your whole history at once — which is exactly the kind of tracklog Lightroom's Map module expects. Bringing a real camera along for the better shots and letting the phone handle the GPS side is a common enough split that this is really what the feature is for. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.