Photos app map now incorrect after update

Question

Photos app map now incorrect after update

Hello

I updated to 18.3.1 on iPhone 13pro and since the update the locations of photos on the map within the iPhone photos app are now incorrect? About 10% are now displayed a couple of miles away from where they were taken? This is very problematic for what I do in life

the photos are a mix of what I have taken on this iPhone 13pro and my iPhone before (transferred by iTunes on PC) so I have not reason to think it’s a glitch with data from earlier iPhone captures because some are taken on the current phone. All photos have been correctly mapped prior to this update, I know this because I use the map on the photo app daily always looking at reference photos

I know I can manually alter locations but in my case it’s 100’s out of 1000’s of photos that are out of place maybe even more than a 1000 photos that have moved on the map

How do I get this bug into the ears of somebody at Apple that will actually care enough to lift it up to somebody with the power and knowledge to fix it?

Thanks for reading

iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 18

Posted on Mar 3, 2025 3:53 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

202,311 points

Mar 3, 2025 9:01 AM in response to Applecausesissues

I have seen occasionally wrong locations for my iPhone photos. Usually the reason has been that some Wi-Fi router near the location where the phots have been taken has been sending a wrong location.

Do you perhaps have new neighbors that just moved in and brought an old Wi-Fi router?

if there is a ship or airplane near with a router sending sending a position from a different country the position can be terribly wrong. I took this schreenshot, when I have been cruising on the river Danube in Croatia - Central Europe.

The Compass.app on my iPhone told me I that was in Kansas in the United States. 😀

This continued for several hours, while all my photos have been tagged with wrong coordinates from a different continent, until I noticed the problem and turned off the Wi-Fi on my iPhone. Immediately the compass started to show the correct location. Next day I could turn on the Wi-Fi again, when the other ship was no longer near us.

As a test, you may want to turn off the Wi-Fi on your iPhone, while you are taking the photos. The iPhone will warn you that Wi-Fi will improve the location accuracy, but sometimes it is just doing the opposite.

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Answer 2

Mar 3, 2025 12:24 PM in response to Applecausesissues

I'm wondering if the GPS data is wrong, or if it's the map that's wrong. We've seen cases where the GPS data was right, but the location has been in another city-- sometimes a continent away! Photos uses the GPS to go off to the internet and download a map location, and the glitch could be there.

If this were my pictures, I'd export them to my Mac, and I'd use a metadata tool like ExifTool Reader to find the actual latitude and longitude coordinates recorded on the picture. But I don't know how do that that on an iPhone.

When you tap and hold on a location map, you can copy or paste a location on a picture. If you copy for one that's correct, and you paste it into another that's wrong, what happens?

Pretty curious…

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Answer 3

Mar 3, 2025 8:28 AM in response to Applecausesissues

Applecausesissues wrote: …About 10% are now displayed a couple of miles away from where they were taken? This is very problematic for what I do in life

I've not seen this, so it's unlikely to be a bug in the system. How is the location different from where it's supposed to be-- is it that the little pointer off, or

is it the name that's not right?

If you take a picture with your iPhone right now, is it off by the same amount?

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Answer 4

Mar 3, 2025 10:52 AM in response to léonie

This is a good plausible point, there is WiFi at work which I seldom connect to, however some photos have moved on the map (up to 4 miles away) that where not taken on WiFi (because I would have been in the middle of nowhere far away from anything so I’m still stumped

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Answer 5

Mar 3, 2025 11:03 AM in response to Richard.Taylor

I am relatively rural, and often take pictures of things out in the middle of nowhere (hence it’s easier for me to find reference pictures via the map based on location rather than looking back in camera roll. So you can see why after the update this is quite a head ache for me…

i have been looking through all the displaced pictures looking for rhyme or reason why this has happened but it’s a complete variety of photos that have moved (up to about 3 or 4 miles away and now appear in random locations from local fields, to the local village)

it can not be a coincidence that this occurs the morning after the update overnight but I think it may be such a niche issue I don’t think it will get much attention or fixed, I can only monitor every picture I take from now on to make sure it appears exactly where I took it.

but to directly answer you question, because im more rural its a little different but i can not explain why photos I know where taken off WiFi, away from anything that where recorded on the map correctly now appear 4 miles away in seemingly random locations. Pictures just say the local villages name as their location title but obviously are then recorded precisely on the map where they where taken, they still do display the villages name but are now displayed as taken somewhere els (not in the village its self) but just further out from my location in seemingly random locations

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Photos app map now incorrect after update

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