Find photos by place
If your camera or phone records GPS coordinates, DarkRay reads them and fills in a city, region and country for the photo. This works offline, with a list of places that comes with the program. You don’t set anything up.
See where a photo was taken
Section titled “See where a photo was taken”Select a photo and open the Metadata section of the info panel. The Location group shows Place (“City, Region, Country”) above the GPS coordinates. A photo with no GPS data shows nothing there.
Search by place
Section titled “Search by place”In the search row:
| Type | Finds |
|---|---|
place:iceland |
A city, region or country that contains the word |
city:tokyo |
Photos in that city |
region:bavaria (or state:) |
Photos in that region |
country:japan |
Photos in that country |
gps |
Photos that have GPS coordinates |
-gps |
Photos that don’t |
Plain words in the search row match place names too. The value columns can list Country, Region and City with counts, so you can click through the places you shot.
How the name is chosen
Section titled “How the name is chosen”DarkRay weighs the places within 25 km by size and distance, so a large city beats a small place next to it. A photo taken in Shibuya reads “Tokyo”, while one in a small village keeps the village’s name. When no place is that close, DarkRay fills in only the region and country. In the open sea, far from any place, it fills in nothing.
Place names are stored beside the photo, not as keywords, so your keyword list stays your own. You can’t edit them.
Technical details: the place list
The list is GeoNames “cities500”: about 225,000 places with 500 or more people, with region and country names. It is licensed CC BY 4.0 and credited under Help › About DarkRay…. A lookup takes tens of microseconds. Names fill in when a photo is imported and when a changed file is read again; a background pass at the end of the startup check fills in photos that have GPS but no place.