Not Geotagged photos in QGIS

Question

Is it possible to import un Geotagged photos in QGIS?

As far as I know this was possible with plugin called eVIS.

As I see it, presently, all the photos which are to be displayed, on a map e. g., in QGIS has to be Geotagged. Is that so or there might be some way around it when using not Geotagged photos?

Answer 1

If you know where on your map your images will be displayed, you can:

1. Create a point layer of the locations with the file path of the desired images as an attribute.

2. Select the Raster Image Marker for the Symbol layer type

3. Click the Data defined override button and choose Edit
   

4. Enter an expression like this, where path is the name of the attribute column holding the image file paths. file:/// must be prepended to the file path.

'file:///' || "path"

Photos are displayed in the map canvas

This will work well if you have a CSV of coordinates and file paths as you can use Add Layer -> Add Delimited Text Layer... to make your points.

Use Meters at Scale as the size unit if you want a fixed size for your photos relative to the map.

Answer 2

As a workaround you can add GPS location with exiftool

exiftool -EXIF:GPSLongitude="-84.683333"  -XMP:GPSLatitude="10.502117"  -GPSLongitudeRef="West" -GPSLatitudeRef="North" no_gps_exif.jpg

Now it is possible to import photos with Import Photos plugin. The command is taken from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41849691/how-to-add-gps-latitude-and-longitude-using-exiftool-in-mac-how-to-edit-meta-da

However, I had to edit the command to use -EXIF:GPSLongitude... instead of -XMP:GPSLongitude because otherwise the Import Photo plugin did not recognize the tags.