I shoot a lot of location jobs and ever since I was an assistant I have kept a rough collection of references for locations in the form of brochures, polaroids, transparencies in various formats kept with notes. This information was not very useful because of my irregular notes and being occasionally vague on crucial details, so really my location library was based on the locations I could remember.

This industry is full of gadgets. One such gadget is a geo-tagger which embeds the global coordinates of where you took the shot into the metadata of the file. I thought geo-tagging images was for flickr groups and rich backpackers with too much time on their hands, but I have found this to be a very simple way to build a collection of location shots within Adobe’s Lightroom, where with a simple click on the metadata embedded coordinates, google maps instantly opens. Combined with Google’s Street View, I have a powerful combination of tools for managing and finding locations.

Road Location

GPS details in Lightroom, the arrow on the right opens the location up Google Maps

The location's position in Google Maps