Immich ReverseGeo
Why People Use It¶
Better place names
Improves country, state, and city names when immich’s built-in result is too rough for the photo.
Tricky places handled better
Often works better around coastlines, islands, border areas, and other places where simple matching falls short.
Smarter airport matching
Can recognize airport areas more accurately, so airport photos can resolve to the airport itself when that is the better fit.
Good Fits¶
Large libraries
Useful when many assets already have coordinates but the place names are missing or low quality.
Self-hosted workflows
Designed for repeatable local processing instead of depending on a third-party geocoding API at run time.
Careful rollouts
Lets you test individual coordinates first, then process the whole library once the results look right.
Features¶
immich integration
Reads your existing photo coordinates and writes improved location names back into immich.
Better matching
Uses built-in location data plus extra country downloads when needed.
Web UI
Change settings, test coordinates, manage downloads, and run processing manually.
Preview before processing
See why a specific coordinate resolves the way it does before you process your full library.
Architecture Overview¶
immich database
Photo coordinates are read from here, and improved location names are written back here.
Immich ReverseGeo app
The web app handles settings, processing, lookups, and download management.
Built-in data
Used for country matching and airport matching right away.
Downloaded data
Extra country data is downloaded when needed for better state and city matching.
Before You Run It On Real Data¶
- It needs direct access to your immich database.
- immich's own reverse geocoding should be turned off first.
- It writes back to immich metadata.
- It can clear existing immich location values from the Data page.
- It needs internet access the first time it downloads extra data for a country.
- Large country downloads can consume hundreds of megabytes each.
Turn off immich's built-in reverse geocoding
Immich ReverseGeo writes city, state, and country back into immich.
If immich's own reverse geocoding remains enabled, both systems can overwrite the same fields and step on each other's results.
Disable immich's built-in reverse geocoding before running Immich ReverseGeo. See immich's official docs: Reverse Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding Settings.
Back up your immich database first
Immich ReverseGeo reads from and writes to immich's database.
Before running processing on real assets, and before clearing existing location fields, create a proper immich backup first: Backup and Restore | Immich