Google Photos is an excellent service, but like all things related to Google, there’s a bit of creepines involved in how uncannily good it is at certain tasks. You may have noticed location information on your photos, even if you have location disabled in the app and camera. What’s up with that?
Here’s the situation. You’ve denied the location permission for both the Google Photos app and the camera app on your phone, but you still see location information appearing in Google Photos. This is an annoying reality that doesn’t seem to make any sense. Where is Google getting this information from if you’ve disabled the locationd data in the camera?
The Problem Isn’t the Photos
Naturally, you might assume that Google Photos is grabbing the location from the photos themselves. Typically, this is how it works—a photo has the location listed in the EXIF metadata, and the app can read it.
Turning off location access in the camera app on your phone prevents the camera from attaching location data from the phone’s GPS chip into the photo metadata. You can easily check the EXIF data of a photo on any platform. Even if you have a photo with no EXIF data to read, Google Photos may still attach a location to it. Although you might not like that location data still seems associated with the photo, the way Google does it is rather clever.
Google Can “Guess” Where You Are
Google doesn’t need precise GPS location information to know where a photo was taken. We can look to Google Lens as a perfect example of the company’s recognition tools. Point the Google Lens app at a landmark, and it will almost certainly be able to identify it for you. Google uses a similar technique to add “Estimated Locations” to photos.
The other part of the equation is your Location History. If you have this feature enabled, Google pretty much always knows where you are. So even if the Google Photos app and the camera aren’t allowed to access your location, Google is still getting it from other apps, especially if you use an Android phone. It’s not hard for Google to figure out where a photo was taken when it knows where you were when it was taken.
Thankfully, using Location History on photos was an opt-in feature that Google did away with last year. The “Estimated Location” feature that uses visible landmarks to pinpoint your location is most likely the culprit. The good news is you can turn it off.
How to Turn Off Estimated Location in Google Photos
Google Photos’ “Estimate Missing Locations” feature can easily be turned off in Settings> Privacy> Location Options on Android or Settings> Location on iPhone and the desktop website.
After you make this change, you may get prompted to delete existing estimated locations that were added to photos.
Google clearly knows a lot about everyone, and location is one of the scarier things to think about. Thankfully, Google does offer quite a few ways to manage your location history, even letting you automatically delete it after a certain amount of time.