Places and journeys
A frame has a location only when the camera or phone recorded one. When enough of them gather into places or run into journeys, the Groups pane lists the places those frames were taken and the journeys between them, so you can narrow the pass to where a frame was shot. This page covers what makes a place or a journey, how each is named, and the setting that can send coordinates off your Mac.
When the section appears
The PLACES section is drawn only when the library holds at least one place or one journey, as the next two sections define them. Location data on its own is not enough: a few frames too scattered, or too few, to form a place or a journey mean no section. A library with no location data at all, which is most of them, does not show it either.
What counts as a place
A place is somewhere at least four frames were taken within about 5 km of one another. So a frame with no location is in no place, and neither is a lone frame taken on the way somewhere. A place is named city, country from a table inside the app, for the nearest town within 50 km, or by its coordinates when nothing is near enough to speak for it.
What counts as a journey
A journey is a run of frames spanning at least 50 km, and it needs at least eight frames whose location carries a GPS time, since a journey is about when as well as where. It is split into legs wherever the camera fell silent for a day. It ends when the camera fell silent for four days; frames after that start another. A journey is named after its busiest leg: Journey to Florence — June 2024. A frame can be in a place and in a journey at once.
Narrowing to a row
Rows are listed most frames first, each with its count; journeys come underneath the places, told apart by their icon. The counts leave out rejected frames, as the people counts do. Click a row and the pass narrows to that place's or journey's frames, on top of everything else — a person included — with a chip on the views line. Click the row again, or the chip's ×, to put it down. From search, place:rome does the same for a place; see Search. It does not reach a journey: place: reads the names of places only, so a journey is narrowed to by its row alone. For the same reason Save view cannot keep a journey's narrowing; the caution in Organise and filter says what happens.
How names are chosen
Under the rows, a small line states this library's naming rule and opens it: Names: from the bundled table · Change…. The dialog, Place names for this library, has one switch, Name places precisely, using Apple's service. On, it sends two things to Apple's geocoder over the network, each as a coordinate and nothing else: the centre of each place, and the centre of each journey's destination, the leg the journey is named after. The dialog's own sentence speaks only of places; the destinations go the same way. Each is looked up once and the answer is cached in the library, so a place can be named more finely, a district rather than a city. Off, the default, names come from the table inside the app and nothing leaves this Mac. Whenever a name on screen came from the table, the section's foot credits it: Place names: GeoNames, CC BY 4.0.