Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
1–10 of 330 posts
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#2This must be a Chrome thing, not an Android thing, no? I didn't test this but I'd be surprised if Firefox behaved the same.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#3Similarly, the native Android photo picker strips the original filename.
This causes daily customer support issues, where people keep asking the app developer why they're renaming their files.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/268079113 Status: Won't Fix (Intended Behavior).
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#4Most likely: actually using the geolocation is an extremely niche usecase for images uploaded from mobile browsers.
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
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#5This must be a Chrome thing, not an Android thing, no? I didn't test this but I'd be surprised if Firefox behaved the same.
Or Firefox would still be using android's file system / upload process, which probably hands off the photos with geotags stripped already.
I'm pretty sure this is what happens in the iPhone at least, so I'd imagine it is the same in Android.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#6Similarly, the native Android photo picker strips the original filename. This causes daily customer support issues, where people keep asking the app developer why they're renaming their files. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/268079113 Status: Won't Fix (Intended Behavior).
This a very weird set of choices by Google. How many users are uploading photos from their camera to their phone so they can then upload them from the phone to the web?
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.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#7Couldn't you use (different than image/jpeg mime-type I think, not sure if that also strips EXIF?), then manually parse the EXIF in JS? Shouldn't be that complicated to parse and I'm guessing there is a bunch of libraries for doing just that should you not want to do that yourself.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#8It's a sad story and a fun-looking project but I think Google 100% did the right thing here. Most people have no idea how much information is included in photo metadata, and stripping it as much as possible lines up to how people expect the world to work.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#9Most likely: actually using the geolocation is an extremely niche usecase for images uploaded from mobile browsers. 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’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.
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.
Re: Android now stops you sharing your location in photos
#10How good are LLMs at geoguessing?