Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
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.
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Looking at the most recent update to the system Photo Picker app delivered as part of the latest Google System Services update, we spotted code that explicitly refers to sharing location data through the Photo Picker interface:
Code
Include location
Location sharing enabled Code
"Don't include"
Location sharing disabled The strings above make it look like Google’s working to add a toggle to the Photo Picker UI that lets users choose whether or not the images they’re sharing with an app will include location data.
We also saw a confirmation dialog that’ll appear when a new app first requests location info with photos or videos:
Code
Include location info?
%1$s is requesting location info with the photos and videos you select It’s not clear when we should expect these changes to roll out, but given the 2022 Issue Tracker thread about this Photo Picker API behavior has comments as recent as this month asking for status updates, it seems like a lot of developers will be pleased when they do. We’ll be keeping an eye out for any official info about the update.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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