Android Photo Picker to gain optional location data sharing for images

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TL;DR

Android’s Photo Picker may soon allow users to share location data attached to photos.

Currently, any photos shared through the Photo Picker UI are stripped of location data for privacy reasons.

It’s unclear when this change could make its way to developers and users.

Google introduced Android’s Photo Picker API in Android 13. The API is a privacy measure, limiting apps’ access to your photos while also stripping location data from images you do choose to share with apps. That behavior has caused headaches for niche apps that rely on photo location data to function properly. Today, we’ve seen evidence that Google’s working to make the image-sharing workflow more flexible, allowing users to opt to include location data with shared images.

Removing location data from images accessed through the Photo Picker makes sense from a privacy perspective, but not long after the API’s introduction, developers took to Google’s Issue Tracker to explain how removing location EXIF data from images interferes with their apps’ (non-invasive) intended use cases. Google said back in 2022 that it would consider the option for users to share image location data as a feature request. It looks like that change may be coming soon.