Why Is immich-go Missing My Geotags?
Locations vanish on Immich import when the sidecar cannot be matched, or when the GPS is all zeros. Here is how to tell the two apart.
Two different things cause this, and the fix depends on which one you have.
The first is matching. immich-go reads the .json sidecar next to each photo, and if it cannot pair them, the location never arrives. Google makes that pairing harder than it should be: sidecar names get cut off at 46 characters, older and newer exports use different naming, and duplicates carry the (1) in a different position. Any photo whose sidecar is not matched imports with no location and no complaint.
The second is that there was never a location. When Google has no GPS for a photo, it writes 0.0, 0.0 rather than leaving the field out. That is a real coordinate in the Atlantic Ocean, so a tool that trusts it either drops the photo in the sea or, sensibly, discards it. Screenshots and chat images are almost always in this group.
The reliable approach is to write the GPS into the photos before Immich ever sees them. The app matches sidecars including all the awkward naming cases, writes real coordinates into EXIF, and treats all-zero coordinates as unknown rather than as the Atlantic. Immich then reads standard EXIF, which it handles perfectly, and your map fills in. The first 500 photos are free.