If you go in and turn location on (which should have a warning on it), then you're the sort of person who changes defaults, a more sophisticated user than the majority of the population who is able to take responsibility for the consequences. Yes, I can imagine a scenario where someone ends up with this setting turned on through no fault of their own, but it shouldn't be the role of an OS vendor to prevent every possible mistake.
You don't get to access or export your own data in order to protect your privacy, but Google still gets 100% access to it.
Some messaging apps do the same and won't let you take a screenshot of your own conversations. Like, someone sent me an address, but I can't take a screenshot to "protect my privacy".
I've done a lot of neat projects with geolocation over the years. Including a personal travel diary, a bunch of visualizations of tweets and Flickr photos, etc etc. I am sad that's become nearly impossible but I do respect that most people don't understand the privacy risk.
Meanwhile on the advertising backend Google knows your exact location and is using it to help third parties target ads to you. And sleazy apps like Grindr sell location streams to anyone who asks. The bad guys get this data, just not the useful apps.
The app is very basic, but has amazingly little barriers to entry. Notably you don't need an account to just report things, what I'd call an "open door" app. Sadly, without gps exif, this is much higher friction now. Pretty pissed at this. It's not hard to design a clean flow that permits to inform the user specifically of location sharing in the picker.
Unfortunately, there is no good way to solve the problem while maintaining convenience. As the author noted, prompts while uploading don't really work. Application defaults don't really work for web browsers, since what is acceptable for one website isn't necessarily acceptable for another. Having the user enter the location through the website make the user aware of the information being disclosed, but it is inconvenient.
Does the situation suck? Yes. On the other hand, I think Google is doing the responsible thing here.
I used to run a small website that allowed users to upload pictures. Most people were not aware that they were telling me where they were, when the picture was taken, their altitude, which direction they were facing, etc.
I will never share my location via images with anybody then myself. I do use location for my local Photoprism on my own server
0 https://codeberg.org/Starfish/Imagepipe#how-to-get-the-app
Element (the matrix client) used to not strip geolocation metadata for the longest time. I don't know if they fixed that yet.
I’d wager 99.9% of the users didn’t realize that they are effectively sending their live GPS coords to a random website when taking a photo.
But yes, a prop to the input tag ’includeLocation’ which would then give the user some popup confirmation prompt would have been nice
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/268079113 Status: Won't Fix (Intended Behavior).
Bluetooth is not QuickShare, stop conflating them. Bluetooth works. I just tried it. It just sends the entire file to the destination, filename intact with all EXIF, no gimmicks, tricks, or extra toggles. As it has always done for 20+ years.
I get it. This unequivocally sucks. It's a clear loss of functionality for a group of people who are educated about the advantages and disadvantages of embedded EXIF data. But I don't honestly think Google could have consulted their community. It's just too big. So when the author says:
> Because Google run an anticompetitive monopoly on their dominant mobile operating system.
I don't think the problem here is that Google is anticompetitive (though that's a problem in other areas). I think it's just too big that they can't possibly consult with any meaningful percentage of their 1 billion customers (or however many Android users are out there). They may also feel it's impossible to educate their users about the benefits and dangers of embedded location information (just thinking about myself personally, I'm certain that I'd struggle to convey they nuances of embedded location data to my parents).
I will note that Google Photos seems to happily let you add images to shared albums with embedded location information. I can't recall if you get any privacy-related warnings or notices.
Is it only for mobile browsers? The article makes it sound [0] as if it is a general thing, even when sharing through bluetooth, and that only copying the image via usb connection allows you to keep geolocation in exif. Not sure what happens when you upload to native apps, eg to some cloud storage app (photo specific or not). I definitely want my location to stay when I make a cloud backup of my photos with an app intended for that.
[0] Quote:
>> Using a "Progressive Web App" doesn't work either. So, can users transfer their photos via Bluetooth or QuickShare? No. That's now broken as well. You can't even directly share via email without the location being stripped away. Literally the only way to get a photo with geolocation intact is to plug in a USB cable, copy the photo to your computer, and then upload it via a desktop web browser?
Phones are computers though, it’s not up to Google or Apple to decide what’s a good use case for my own pictures.
https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
> Photographs > If your app uses scoped storage, the system hides location information by default
When sharing via FileProvider from file managers like MiXplorer or Total Commander, the raw file is sent as is, and the GPS location stays intact.
I don't know how modern your Android phone is, but on all of mine sharing via Bluetooth strips away some of the EXIF.
I'm pretty sure this is what happens in the iPhone at least, so I'd imagine it is the same in Android.
Who knows, it may eventually be only available on Motorola devices.
Well that's a good thing, isn't it?
Not sure if there's a way to do that by default, I've never checked.
The thing is, they frequently do. They have developer relations people, they publish blog posts about breaking changes, they work with W3C and other standards bodies, they reply on bug trackers.
But, in this case, nothing. Just a unilateral change with no communication. Not even a blog posts saying "As of April, this functionality is deprecated."
[0] https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2025/08/14/llms-vs-geol...
I'd wager 90% of the photos on Google Maps associated with various listings don't actually know their photos are in public. I keep coming across selfies and other photos that look very personal, but somehow someone uploaded to Google Maps, the photo is next to a store or something and Google somehow linked them together, probably by EXIF.
Something that is very useful to 1% of users is stripped away. And we end up with dumb appliances (and ironically - most likely still no privacy )
I remember one of my cameras or phones including a "seconds since device startup" counter; together with the exact time the photo was taken, this yields a precise timestamp of when a phone was last restarted. This by itself can be highly deanonymizing out of a small to medium sized set of candidate phones/photographers.
What made the data junk? Were the provided coordinates not precise enough, incorrect, something else?
Its better to do it from the source, obviously.
Wish android copied them for once lol
Android used to ask you "do you want to alllow internet access?" as an app permission. Google removed that, as it would stop ads from showing up. Devastating change for privacy and security, great for revenue.
I sometimes do that for random pictures, even like selfies, which I don't mind popping up there.
This sounds like a downward spiral concerning freedom.
If you want filenames, you need to request access to a directory, not to an image
I bet almost 100% of photo uploads using the default Android photo picker, or the default Android web browser, are of photos that were taken with the default Android camera app. If Google feels that the location tags and filenames are unacceptably invasive, it can stop writing them that way.
People act like Google products are a charity that had been free forever, and then this mega-corp called Google came along and started harvesting the data of innocent people who just want to get directions to Starbucks.
I think the linked spec suggestion makes the most sense: make the feature opt-in in the file picker, probably require the user to grant location permissions when uploading files with EXIF location information.
There are plenty of use cases where the filename is relevant (and many, many people intentionally use the image name for sorting / cataloging).
You review the photo and go "lol, sure".
At least for me that doesn't even feel like posting due to how frictionless it is and that it's about natural discoverability (someone has to click that POI and scroll through photos to find it).
https://www.reddit.com/r/tasker/comments/1mxjnvs/how_to_bloc...
If I'm playing it on my commute, it's usable with mobile data disabled for the app. But when the train stops in a station long enough to auto-connect to wifi, immediate full screen adverts :(
/User/user/Images/20240110/happy_birthday.jpg
and
/User/user/Desktop/happy_birthday.jpg
are the same image.
I want exactly that: the OS to translate between that boundary with a sane default. It’s unavoidable to have cases where this is inconvenient or irritating.
I don’t even know on iPhone how files are named “internally” (nor do I care), since I do not access the native file system or even file format but in 99% of all use cases come in contact only with the exported JPEGs. I do want to see all my photos on a map based on the location they were taken, and I want a timestamp. Locally. Not when I share a photo with a third party.
Something can be "not invasive" when only done locally, but turn out to be a bad idea when you share publicly. Not hard to imagine a lot of users want to organize their libraries by location in a easy way, but still not share the location of every photo they share online.
To _their phone_ specifically? Probably almost nobody. But to their Google/Apple Photos library?
A lot, if not most of people who use DSLRs and other point-and-shoot cameras. Most people want a single library of photos, not segregated based on which device they shot it on.
I don't think this has anything to do with Google Photos. People fall victim to doxxing or stalking or even location history tracking by third party apps all the time because they don't realize their pictures contain location information. It's extra confusion to laypeople now that many apps (such as Discord) will strip EXIF data but others (websites, some chat apps) don't.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...
The word default is more appropriately used when the decision can be changed to something the user finds more suitable for their usecase
Google’s main business is ads, ie running hostile code on your machine.
- have a local backup - being able to see them from a larger screen - being able to share them - sync them to home while I am away
I don't upload anything to google photos or apple cloud.
My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map.
Google's Android has now broken that.
On the web, we used to use:
HTML
<input type="file" accept="image/jpeg">
That opened the phone's photo picker and let the use upload a geotagged photo. But a while ago Google deliberately broke that.
Instead, we were encourage to use the file picker:
HTML
<input type="file">
That opened the default file manager. This had the unfortunate side-effect of allowing the user to upload any file, rather than just photos. But it did allow the EXIF metadata through unmolested. Then Google broke that as well.
Using a "Progressive Web App" doesn't work either.
So, can users transfer their photos via Bluetooth or QuickShare? No. That's now broken as well.
You can't even directly share via email without the location being stripped away.
Literally the only way to get a photo with geolocation intact is to plug in a USB cable, copy the photo to your computer, and then upload it via a desktop web browser?
Because Google run an anticompetitive monopoly on their dominant mobile operating system.
Privacy.
There's a worry that users don't know they're taking photos with geolocation enabled. If you post a cute picture of your kid / jewellery / pint then there's a risk that a ne’er-do-well could find your exact location.
Most social media services are sensible and strip the location automatically. If you try to send a geotagged photo to Facebook / Mastodon / BlueSky / WhatsApp / etc, they default to not showing the location. You can add it in manually if you want, but anyone downloading your photo won't see the geotag.
And, you know, I get it. Google doesn't want the headline "Stalkers found me, kidnapped my baby, and stole my wedding ring - how a little known Android feature puts you in danger!"
But it is just so tiresome that Google never consults their community. There was no advance notice of this change that I could find. Just a bunch of frustrated users in my inbox blaming me for breaking something.
I don't know what the answer is. Perhaps a pop up saying "This website wants to see the location of your photos. Yes / No / Always / Never"? People get tired of constant prompts and the wording will never be clear enough for most users.
It looks like the only option available will be to develop a native Android app (and an iOS one?!) with all the cost, effort, and admin that entails. Android apps have a special permission for accessing geolocation in images.
If anyone has a working way to let Android web-browsers access the full geolocation EXIF metadata of photos uploaded on the web, please drop a comment in the box.
In the meantime, please leave a +1 on this HTML Spec comment.
Wouldn't it be better if people were more tech-literate?
Coddling only works when those who are in charge of the tech play nice. But then breeds people who will more easily fall victim to the bad actors.
Not impossible, just different and arguably better - comparing hashes is a better tool for finding duplicates.
People who know about phishing get got by phishing attacks, too. How well has however many years of "cyber awareness training" gone?