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
I coulda sworn, even in earlier versions of iOS 26, if you told it not to include location when sending a photo once then it would not include it by default the next time.
Also I thought that when you uploaded a photo from your camera roll to the web I thought it defaulted to no location. And that seems to have changed too. (Of course, you can still tap a button to withhold location EXIF.)
But in the real world, if you put a QR code at the trailhead and said "take a picture of this code. When you see a tortoise nest, use the code to go to our website and share your exact location."
If people are wary of sharing their location with the conservation agency, you might have better luck if the website was run by a nongovernmental conservation group?
I wanted us to do this so badly; inter-agency coordination was the biggest issue with I had with large-scale projects. The funny part about your comment is that each feature you listed was a function that a different agency or contractor handled. I won't name names, but the agency I worked for had better-than-expected public outreach and engagement and were organizationally flexible enough to get low-footprint, high-impact conservation PR like this out the door and in front of people in time to make a difference. But in state government, the idea of several agencies pooling resources for a permanent app store project is totally pie-in-the-sky thinking largely because nobody has the bandwidth to contribute. I'm trying to imagine submitting a PR to 'The State Parks App' org board to get this form shipped and in every instance, I'm getting yelled at.
> If people are wary of sharing their location with the conservation agency, you might have better luck if the website was run by a nongovernmental conservation group?
Our NGO partners were incredible for this sort of thing. People legitimately do not think twice about pinging a facebook group run by, say, the local aquarium and including their location, a description of the site, and photos of what they found. Social media removes a lot of metadata from uploads - they probably keep it someplace and I just can't get at it without a brokerage, idk - but it still gets better results than we did. One fix for the tortoise problem was to supply personal trail maps and golf pencils at trail heads. Hikers were encouraged to take them, mark on the map where they saw burrows along the trail, and put them in a box at the end of the trail/parking lot/ranger station. Park rangers would scan in the maps and upload the scans to our internal site and we would work it out from there.
What made the data junk? Were the provided coordinates not precise enough, incorrect, something else?
I for one am glad that that's the trained reaction of the masses
If you're filling out a form with the express purpose of letting someone know specifically where something is... a request for location information is reasonable, duh. And I won't accept the "people are busy and don't have the time and energy to think this through" excuse. If you're taking the time to fill out this form, then yes, you have the time -- seconds, at most -- to think this through in this particular case.
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.
I sometimes do that for random pictures, even like selfies, which I don't mind popping up there.
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?
Seems like this is possibly related to the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission[1], and Google's recent efforts to force applications to migrate to the scoped storage API. See: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
Probably someone more versed in Android's APIs could give a better explanation.
[1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per...
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
So if the app-developer didn't take explicit effort to request this data (and the user-permission for it), his app will not receive it.
[0] https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
Can you compress a folder with a photo it and then email that? Just curious.
If the app that creates the compressed file uses the media API to get the file and doesn't have the permission to get location-info, the data will be stripped before the OS is handing the file over to that app. This is likely different if the app uses the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission and API's to read the files though, which is a legacy permission that was mainly kept for file managers now...
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
Source: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
Phones are computers though, it’s not up to Google or Apple to decide what’s a good use case for my own pictures.
That's not a good position to be in; this duopoly we've allowed to prosper needs to go.
The whole reason I and my entire family have iPhones is because there are entire classes of scams and scum that you don't have to be constantly vigilant against. If it didn't do that, I wouldn't buy them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/am9mzq/its_neat_...
(and why do they have to strip almost ALL EXIF data, instead of just location? [yes, yes, fingerprinting, but there are LOTS of iPhone {NUMBER} whatever out there])
It really just needs to be clearly communicated, opt-in at attach time. Probably with a severely hidden, developer-screen level, or BIG WARNING in security settings to totally disable stripping.
I assume most people won't want it, _usually_, so when adding photos just have it be a double-opt in - you have to both hit an extra button during attachment, then select "include location" or "include location and metadata", then a modal warning/confirmation.
Something like: "Confirm including photo location? This will permit the recipient to see where the pictures were taken. <yes/no>"
After seeing this post I checked my recent photos. I'm using a Pixel 6 Pro with the most recent android release and the stock camera app. None of my recent photos have location in the EXIF, even locally, and there's no option to turn it on.
It's particularly galling that the Camera app still wants location permissions and if you view a photo in the Google Photos app, the location is still there. Google can have those exact locations, but no one, not even the user, can.
It's abusive as hell.
The current behavior is exactly what I wanted.
These "all users are imbeciles that need our protection" design pattern needs to die a swift death.
It's maddening, We're constantly taking kitchen knives and replacing them with the colorful plastic toddler version and still have the same cutting tasks.
Chrome doesn't seem to request that permission, so the OS doesn't provide the location-data to the app.
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
Source: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
No. Upload file means upload file. If you want to mutate the file, mutate the file.
When tools assume you're stupid and insert silent surprises unrelated to the task they no longer deserve the title "tool" because they are fundamentally doing other things.
I have not seen an ad in years.
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 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.
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.
Chrome doesn't seem to request that permission, so the OS doesn't provide the location-data to the app. So Chrome rather ended up in this state by doing nothing, not by explicitly doing something...
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
Source: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
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.
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.
As per op, it seems they've shut down _any_ means for you to get the data out of the phone other than using a USB cable.
Chrome doesn't seem to request that permission, so the OS doesn't provide the location-data to the app. So Chrome rather ended up in this state by doing nothing, not by explicitly doing something...
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
Source: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
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.
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.
I think the 'ideal' thing to do would be an opt-in toggle for sharing "location and other extended info" for photos when selecting them, but I'm sure you can understand why a dev team took a shortcut to solve the immediate pain for most users most of the time.
To dismiss the banner you'd have to click a dismiss button which would ask you to confirm that you want to get rid of the location data completely. Then there would be a tiny little button that says “hide this location inside the photo, where I can't see it easily, but everyone totally could”. (But less stupid.)
It would be terrible because there would be huge support threads on why it's trying to share an image with an overlay, but it would get it across. Would be a different failure mode for user privacy than what you would have with a text prompt or an interstitial or whatever.
Its better to do it from the source, obviously.
Meanwhile, Google probably has one of the most comprehensive databases on the planet of user behavior, gleaned from tracking their users all over the internet. Surveillance capitalism at its finest. But hey, they protect people from accidentally sending their photo geolocations to random websites, so good job Google, pat on the back for you.
This sounds like a downward spiral concerning freedom.
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".
Chrome doesn't seem to request that permission, so the OS doesn't provide the location-data to the app. So Chrome rather ended up in this state by doing nothing, not by explicitly doing something...
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
Source: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
I'm sure it's given some businesses the confidence to invest in iOS app development, but it felt bad.
I'm not _entirely_ upset Apple is encouraging the market to develop high-quality solutions by allowing them to protect their revenue.
But it felt bad as if they were reaching into my Mac.
My iPhone is Apple’s playground. They let me use it. But I own my Mac, and if my eyes see something on the screen it feels dumb to send Tim Apple and Reed Hastings into my homeoffice telling me “no no get a capture card(?) or set up a DSLR to record your screen. But no direct recording big guy!”
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/268079113 Status: Won't Fix (Intended Behavior).
If you want filenames, you need to request access to a directory, not to an image
There are plenty of use cases where the filename is relevant (and many, many people intentionally use the image name for sorting / cataloging).
/User/user/Images/20240110/happy_birthday.jpg
and
/User/user/Desktop/happy_birthday.jpg
are the same image.
Not impossible, just different and arguably better - comparing hashes is a better tool for finding duplicates.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...
Depends on what is meant by a "duplicate." It would be a good idea to get a checksum of the file, which can detect exact data duplicates, but not something where metadata is removed or if the image was rescaled. Perceptual hashing is more expensive but is better distinguish matches between rescaled or cropped images.
Depending on how it'll be used next, not only can the current filename be important, I may even want to give something a custom filename with more data than before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The location isn't just embedded in the EXIF tags. It's also embedded in the visual content.
I imagine people will get tired of their image uploads being blacked out pretty quickly.
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.
- 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.
I think it's really neat Google Photos lets you see all photos taken at a particular location. One of my pet peeves is when friends share photos with me that we took together at a gathering and only the ones I took with my phone show up in that list unless I manually add location data. (Inaccurate timestamps are an even more annoying related issue.)
":<>?|\*
[0]: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/952
I am surprised that the # symbol isn’t on the list.
Recently, I've been struggling with adding locations to some photos after-the-fact, such as edited photos as well as screenshots (because these screenshots are from location-based apps).
The Photos app always tells me that "location will only be visible inside Photos" -- that is, only to users of the app, and those who I share with inside the app. If the image is downloaded or extracted from the Photos app, apparently it will lose that location info and it won't be stored in the EXIF as normal.
This is because Android, like iOS, seeks to assert control over the JPEG/PNG image file types, and claim them as a special object type which can only be handled by Photos and other image-handling apps.
These image-format objects will no longer be treated as normal files that you can just throw anywhere, but as something that only Photos can handle on your phone, and tied inextricably to the Photos app. Therefore, any metadata that you add shall be stored and managed by Photos, and not in the file itself, because that would be interoperable, and that would be absolutely nuts!
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.
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 other suggestion about requiring something like a useLocation or includeExif attribute on the file picker, and then requiring confirmation from the user, seems like a much better solution to me.
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.
Element (the matrix client) used to not strip geolocation metadata for the longest time. I don't know if they fixed that yet.
I care less about the location data as I usually know where the photos are just by looking at them but I understand there are good use cases for it and agree including location should be a user choice
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.
Thankfully F-Droid has a "never update this app" checkbox for now, but eventually I'm sure third-party developers will require minimum Android versions that mean I need to lose this functionality :/
Edit: found it, it was VesIC https://github.com/VincentEngel/VES-Image-Compare/releases/t...
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.
But do you remember every options you've randomly toggled over the years? It's pretty easy to see how someone would flip on geotagging, forget about it, then be shocked a few months later when they discover all their photos are leaking their location.
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
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Google-Chrome-makes-cookie-thef...
However had to me this reads as "we control the now private web". This also aligns, in my opinion, with age verification (systemd already pushes for it). So we move into a not so open world wide web. Are you identified? If yes, you can get information; if no you can not. Personally I am in the underground anyway, as long-term linux users so I don't really care that much (though I also use Win10 on a computer on my left side, for various reasons). But I am really annoyed at Google. Every day Google adds to problems and drama. It is not good that this monopoly can control so much in the whole ecosystem, even if I don't understand why people want to share photos and geolocation and what underwear they were wearing at that moment in time ...
If your app targets Android 10 (API level 29) or higher and needs to retrieve unredacted EXIF metadata from photos, you need to declare the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission in your app's manifest, then request this permission at runtime.
Caution: Because you request the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission at runtime, there is no guarantee that your app has access to unredacted EXIF metadata from photos. Your app requires explicit user consent to gain access to this information.
I made another quick check on my device, Chrome doesn't have the ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION permission and doesn't seem to request it at runtime, so the location info is stripped from the EXIF data (by the OS!) when a file is selected.
Chromium also seems have no feature to ask the user whether he agrees to share the stored location when uploading images, so there is probably no capability to request the permission at runtime.
Not satisfying, I know, but despite some judgements in the tickets the implementation seems to work as designed.
Instead, it could be considered a feature-request for Chrome to ask the user about this on upload, or couple the location-permission of a website to the permission to share EXIF-location data when uploading files (Although I think the logic on that is not really tight, the user giving permission to share his location now doesn't necessarily mean that he agrees to share all his locations from the past from EXIF-data)
[0] https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
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 don't know how modern your Android phone is, but on all of mine sharing via Bluetooth strips away some of the EXIF.
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.
https://i.imgur.com/cwbigQ8.mp4 before: https://i.imgur.com/ixBvA4T.jpeg after (received): https://i.imgur.com/S5fTEG4.jpeg
However, I confirmed that the GPS location remains when sharing an image file that isn't stored in the MediaStore (for example, placed in the same directory as a .nomedia file). In this case, only the Share button is displayed at the bottom of the Photos app, and the shared URI is not `content://com.google.android.apps.photos.contentprovider/0/1/content://media/...` but like `content://com.google.android.apps.photos.contentprovider/-1/1/file:///data/...`. You can check the URI by sharing to Intent Intercept app on F-Droid.
I'm pretty sure this is what happens in the iPhone at least, so I'd imagine it is the same in Android.
Since it's a rare web site that leaves the EXIF data intact, I guess this is aimed at apps harvesting photos on the device itself. I hope Firefox gets a new site permission that allows you to upload photos with the EXIF intact, because that's often what I want. But that won't happen for a while, and until apps do get their permissions updated it's going to be annoying. It will be a right proper PITA to discover later your EXIF data is gone from the photos you transferred to your laptop.
Suncalc models the relationship between the date, time of day, the geographic
location of a place, and the position of the sun in the sky, together with
the length & direction of the shadows it casts. [0]
What's next, "I can't let you view this content, it has been deemed too radical "?
Show a location picker with the user's current location and the option to select an alternative location. Not as smooth as using EXIF data, but doable.
I guess I share to point out that the solution of developing a android native app is not that burdensome, and it is some kind of data you want the user to be intentional with.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T356260
Just more push and pull on privacy, mostly pulling it away from you, it seems.
How can we combat being mislead by false AI generated images? I'd say keeping track of provenance is what we should adopt, at least as an option. I hope we will find solutions to propagate images over the net reliably keeping how, when and where they were taken.
Well that's a good thing, isn't it?
Who knows, it may eventually be only available on Motorola devices.
1. Copy file from A to B
2. Publish file to a public realm
If Google thinks that the average site cannot be trusted to indicate/clarify the difference... Well, that's fair, but (as the blogpost says) I'd rather see some browser permission thing like: "Can this website see original filenames and GPS data inside any media you upload?"
Not sure if there's a way to do that by default, I've never checked.
Wish android copied them for once lol
(Of course, Google's move shouldn't have been altruistic, it would have been pragmatic as mentioned elsewhere.)
If I got paid a nickel every time someone talked about protecting children online and I reinvested it into technology accessibility for seniors, it'd be fully funded! :)
Strange UI that they are involuntarily capturing but then removing it.
It uses native APIs to request the media file from the OS and since the app doesn't request the permission to receive location data along with it, the OS provides the files without the location
Related permission: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/m...
[0] https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2025/08/14/llms-vs-geol...
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.
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."
No. I don't want people like you unknowingly spying on me when I upload a picture. GrapheneOS patched that insane behavior long ago, but not including leaky metadata should be the default, sane behavior.
As one can imagine, even when turning location services back on, the photo will never contain location data.
Mainly top versus bottom placement, I think, but also font size.
Anyways, I did this: https://jsbin.com/teriduyexe/edit?html,output
Which correctly seems to show the EXIF for uploaded images (both in Chrome and Firefox), and correctly filters things in the file picker window. What am I missing, why is this infeasible as a solution?
Both just show zeros in the GPS EXIF - the rest of the data are passed through unaltered.