We’ve all struggled to find that specific photo we wanted to show someone from our gallery, but some features help speed up the process. For instance, Google Photos allows you to capture the location data automatically with every photo and even tag faces in them, making the right image easier to find in a jiffy. Google Photos also uses a few tricks to estimate the location of images lacking geodata, but it is making a few changes to its policies.
If you don’t allow the Camera app to save photos with location data, Google Photos attempts to estimate the location using one of two ways — identifying visible landmarks in the images, and using your Location History collected in the background. The latter is an opt-in Google account setting designed to help the service use your location data to tailor-fit your Maps experience and recommendations.
Google says the Photos app will stop using Location History data to estimate where you snapped specific photos. If you leave the Estimate missing locations setting switched on in Photos, Google will now rely solely on its ability to identify landmarks in your images. This change has started rolling out gradually, and in the next few months, Photos may prompt you to keep or delete your existing location estimates associated with images. To record accurate image locations, we suggest enabling the corresponding setting via the Camera app on your device.
In its support documentation explaining the change, Google clarifies your memories will remain untouched, but it will auto-remove all the estimated locations if you don’t decide to keep or remove them before May 1, 2023. Note that this deletion only affects location data associated with photos, and not that associated with the independent Location History feature.
The company’s plans to rely solely on landmark identification in photos to approximate their location appears to be a part of a broader push towards capabilities like Google Lens. Recently, the Photos app started testing a rather similar image search button too. This may sound like a big planned leap into the future, but we fear location approximation could soon end up worse, because most people seldom snap images with recognizable monuments and landmarks entirely or partially in frame.