Adding Windows Explorer ability to view geo tags

March 20, 2025 12:42 AM

I'm increasingly usinging geo-tagging on when I take site images with my phone. Amazingly Windows has this capability but the only way I've found so that Windows Explorer will show it is via a Registry Edit [superuser link] which makes me very cautious as I don't use RegEdit on the daily so

could someone please cast their eye over the script in the link? the script is repeated below. Also where do I save the script to so Windows will operate on it? My photo's for this are mainly on my local NAS. My system is Windows 10 Home Version 22H2.

I thought tons of people would want this capability and lots would be chatting about it but nada, almost nothing. Just to be clear I'm want to be able to set the Explorere view to list and see which images have a geo tag.

I've made short RegEdits in the past, just this one looks intimidating.

The script as per the link:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderTypes\{b3690e58-e961-423b-b687-386ebfd83239}\TopViews\{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}]
"ColumnList"="prop:0System.ItemNameDisplay;0System.ItemDate;0System.ItemTypeText;0System.Size;0System.Keywords;1System.GPS.Latitude;1System.GPS.Longitude;1System.GPS.Altitude;1System.DateCreated;1System.DateModified;1System.Photo.DateTaken;1System.Image.Dimensions;1System.Rating"
"IconSize"=dword:00000060
"LogicalViewMode"=dword:00000003
"Name"="NoName"
"Order"=dword:00000000

If it matters or helps my phone image EXIF tags have this format:
Phone:
EXIF GPSIFD @ Absolute 0x000003C4
Dir Length = 0x000A
[GPSVersionID ] = 2.2.0.0
[GPSLatitudeRef ] = "S"
[GPSLatitude ] = 46 deg 21' 5.556"
[GPSLongitudeRef ] = "E"
[GPSLongitude ] = 167 deg 56' 43.784"
[GPSAltitudeRef ] = Above Sea Level
[GPSAltitude ] = 3.000 m

posted by unearthed to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

This looks fine and like it does what it says.
posted by kbanas at 5:23 AM on March 20

It looks fine, and does what it says (on Windows 11). Create a new text file anywhere you like. Copy & paste what you have above into it. Save it as AddLatLong.reg (or whatever.reg. The .reg is the important bit). Double click the new .reg file, and grant permission to have it edit the registry. The hard bit is done. You might need to reboot to see the change, or manually restart explorer.exe if you're comfortable doing that.
posted by quinndexter at 5:54 AM on March 20

If you're using Notepad to create that text file, change the File Type inside the Save As dialog from Text to All Files before completing the save as Whatever.reg.

If you skip that step, the file you'll end up with will actually be Whatever.reg.txt. It will show up in the Windows file browser as Whatever.reg, but only because that file browser suppresses extensions for known file types by default, and .txt is a known file type. A properly saved Whatever.reg will just show up as Whatever, and it will have a little gearwheels icon instead of the dogeared-page one used for text files.

You can use Notepad to edit any existing .reg file by right-clicking on the file in the browser and choosing Edit from the context menu. If you do that, you don't need to repeat the Save As file type dance; Notepad will do the right thing by default in this case.

Also, if you'd rather not faff about with registry edits I believe you can achieve the same thing from the GUI. If I recall correctly, right-clicking on the row of column headers in any file browser window set to Details view will expose a context menu that includes Choose Columns, and the EXIF stuff should be there amongst the columns you can choose to have displayed. You can also drag column headers left and right to put them in the order you prefer.
posted by flabdablet at 6:22 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

Also also, any .reg file like this one that only makes changes inside HKEY_CURRENT_USER shouldn't need to be given administrative privileges via User Account Control in order to do that, because it only affects the workings of the current user's account.

You do need administrative privileges to make changes inside HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, which is a system-wide registry hive that affects all users.

Quite a lot of registry changes designed to affect the behaviour of explorer.exe (the Windows file browser, fka Windows Explorer) don't come into effect until the next time it's started, which since it's in charge of displaying the Windows desktop, usually happens at logon. You can kill and restart Explorer from a Task Manager window, but the path of least faff is almost always just to log off and then log on again (a proper logoff, not a mere visit to the lock screen).

If in any doubt, just restart Windows.
posted by flabdablet at 6:35 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

it will have a little gearwheels icon

Actually just thinking about it, the little gearwheels icon is for .cmd scripts. Registry edits get a blue shattered Rubik's cube thing.
posted by flabdablet at 10:03 AM on March 20

Response by poster: Thanks kbanas , to quinndexter for running it to test, and flabdablet for in-depth how to. It works very nicely imgur.

In the end I saved in to: C:\Users\username\reg_scripts as it wouldn't pickup when run from a top level folder on C.

C:\cmdTools\

I had to restart twice before it picked it up, and it's still not running on my NAS, but it's very good all the same.
posted by unearthed at 1:34 PM on March 20

Registry edits are not really something that "run" after you've applied them. Think of the registry more as a massive centralized collection of preferences settings to be consulted by the stuff that does run, which in the case of these particular settings is explorer.exe. Having applied an edit to the registry, you no longer need to keep the .reg file that you used in order to do that unless you think you might need to copy it to another machine or to another user account in order to apply it there as well.

If you've applied a registry edit and it's not immediately having the desired effect, that won't be because there's something wrong with the folder in which you saved the .reg file, it will just be that the particular application that looks at that setting hasn't looked at it yet. The most common reason for that is applications that check their own registry settings only when they first start up. In the case of an application as central to the operation of the Windows UI as explorer.exe is, forcing it actually to start up from cold as opposed to restoring itself from some kind of suspended state can be surprisingly tricky.

If explorer.exe isn't showing you the EXIF details for files stored on your NAS but does show them for files on your local disks, that will have nothing to do with where or whether you've chosen to keep your .reg file. What it's most likely to be is explorer.exe making a specific distinction between files stored locally and files stored elsewhere, purely for performance reasons.

EXIF metadata, unlike filenames and filetypes and modification dates, is stored not in a file's directory entry but inside the body of the file itself. So in order to display it, Windows actually needs to perform a file-open and file-read operation on every individual file after doing the simple directory-listing operation it uses to show you all the other stuff. Those operations are generally about ten times slower for network-accessible files than for locally stored ones, and on any folder with more than a handful of files in it they would cause perceptible amounts of lag that you wouldn't see for a locally stored folder.

If the EXIF stuff shows up correctly in the Properties sheet for an individual NAS-stored photo but not in the details columns for its containing folder, that's most likely what's going on. You can confirm it by making a temporary copy of that folder onto a local disk and checking whether the EXIF data is then exposed as you expect.

MP3 tags (artist, song and album titles, year recorded and so forth) work similarly to EXIF metadata in this regard, so if you've got music stored on your NAS I would expect you to be seeing similar details-suppression behaviour for those as well.

There's probably another undocumented registry setting somewhere else that tells explorer.exe never to suppress details that it would have to scrobble inside files to dig out, but I couldn't tell you what that is.
posted by flabdablet at 6:58 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

In addition: If you do want to add any columns that are in the metadata of files to the details view in Windows Explorer, you can do it directly through the UI

1. Go to the folder with your files in
2. Select Details View
3. Right click on the column headings
4. Select More... from the popup menu
5. Scroll down and choose the metadata you want it to show

Hopefully that might end up useful if you want to see any other columns.
posted by ambrosen at 7:43 AM on March 21