How to See Your Photos on a Map Without Importing Them Into Photos

November 4, 2026 · 5 min read

Most photos taken with a phone, and those from a camera that records its location, keep where they were taken: a latitude and a longitude written inside the file, next to the date. On a Mac, the Photos app turns that into a map of your library. But it only maps the photos you have imported into it. The pictures of a trip that are still on the memory card, copied to an external drive, kept in a Dropbox folder or sent by a friend carry the same coordinates, and macOS gives you no map of a folder.

The short answer: for a single photo, open it in Preview, choose Tools › Show Inspector and look at the GPS tab, which has a Show in Maps button. For a whole folder, the Map module of Folia Files puts every geotagged photo of the folder you are browsing, and of its subfolders, on a map. Nothing is imported, copied or moved: the photos stay where they are.

Why not import them into Photos?

Photos works on its own library. To see a folder on its map, you import the folder first, and with Copy items to the Photos library turned on in Photos › Settings › General, as it is unless you change it, every file is copied into the library: a second copy of the whole trip on your disk. Once inside, the photos are sorted by date and album, not by the folders you made.

That suits a phone's camera roll. It suits less a client's shoot on an external drive, an archive sorted by year and place, or a card you only want to check before deciding what to keep. The Finder, for its part, has no map at all.

Check where one photo was taken, with Preview

Open the photo in Preview.
Choose Tools › Show Inspector.
In the More Info tab, open GPS: it shows the coordinates, and Show in Maps opens the spot in the Maps app.

No GPS tab means the photo has no location: a camera without GPS, location turned off for the camera, or a copy whose location was removed before it was shared.

In Terminal, mdls -name kMDItemLatitude -name kMDItemLongitude photo.jpg prints the coordinates Spotlight has read, on a disk that Spotlight indexes.

Both are fine for one photo. For two hundred, you want a map.

See a whole folder on a map with Folia Files

Show the Map module

Open the folder in a Folia Files pane: the card's DCIM folder, the folder on your external drive, a folder of your Dropbox.
Choose View › Show Right Sidebar (⌥⌘E).
Click Modules above the right sidebar and tick Map.

The map follows the active pane: open another folder and it reads that one instead. Its last line counts what it found, for example “9 photos on the map · 18 without a location”: pictures without coordinates are counted, not placed.

A folder of trip photos in Folia Files in Gallery view, with the Map module in the right sidebar: the photos where they were taken in Iceland, the selected one circled

Give it more room

The sidebar is narrow. For a large map, drag New Pane from the toolbar to the right edge of the window and choose Map in the grid that appears; View › New Pane on the Right… (⌥⌘<kbd></kbd>) opens the same grid without dragging. The map pane follows the folder pane beside it, as the sidebar module does. The modules page shows the other places a module can go, and the other modules.

Use the map

Each pin is a thumbnail of the photo. Photos taken close together gather into one pin with their number: click it to zoom in. When they were all taken on the same spot, the click selects them all instead.
Click a photo and Folia Files selects it in the pane. If it sits in a subfolder, it shows in the Info and Preview modules.
Double-click a photo to open it in its usual app.
Select photos in the pane: they are circled on the map, and a single one that is out of view is brought to the middle.
Right-click a photo for Open, Quick Look, Show in Enclosing Folder and Open in Maps.
After moving around, the button at the bottom right, Show All Photos, fits every photo in view again.

Choose what it shows

The gear in the module's header opens its options:

Include Subfolders, on by default: the folder and everything under it. Open your Pictures folder, and the photos of every trip below it appear at once.
Map or Satellite.
Place Names, off by default (see below).

The Pictures folder in Folia Files in Tree view, the Iceland trip unfolded, with the Map module in a pane beside it showing the photos of its subfolders where they were taken, the selected one circled

What the map reads, and what it leaves alone

Photos: JPEG, HEIC, PNG, TIFF, WebP, AVIF, DNG and camera raw files (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2 and more). The coordinates are read from each file's metadata in the background, so the window keeps responding while a big folder is read.
Videos (MOV, MP4, M4V…): placed where Spotlight says they were filmed, when it knows.
Files kept only in the cloud (iCloud Drive, or a Dropbox or OneDrive folder that keeps files online): never downloaded. The map asks Spotlight for their location and, when it has one, shows them without a thumbnail.
Left alone: hidden folders, packages (so the Photos library itself is never opened), subfolders on another disk, and folders on a server, such as a NAS share or a connection made in Folia Files. Copy those photos to the Mac or to an external drive first.
Very large folders: it stops at 20,000 photos or 20,000 folders and says so on its last line.

What stays on your Mac

The coordinates are read on your Mac, and nothing is sent to the makers of Folia Files. The map itself comes from Apple Maps, which, like any map app, receives the area it shows. Place Names adds to the last line the city and country of the selected photo, or of the map's center; to find them, those coordinates are sent to Apple. That is why it stays off until you turn it on.

The coordinates also travel with the file when you share it. If you would rather they didn't, remove the location before sharing. And if your photos are still on a card, import them without the Photos app into dated folders, then open one in a pane and look at the map.