Uncover the hidden story

Android removes it before Photo Trace ever sees the photo. Since Android 13, the system photo picker strips GPS coordinates out of any image you hand to an app or website. There is no prompt, no warning, and no setting a web page can change — the file that reaches your browser has already had its coordinates deleted, even though the empty location tags remain inside it.

This is why the same photo can show its location in your phone’s gallery app but not in Chrome: the gallery reads the file directly from storage, while Chrome receives a copy that Android has scrubbed.

Ways to see the location anyway:

• Open Photo Trace in your phone’s built-in browser (for example the OnePlus, Samsung Internet, or Mi browser) instead of Chrome — these often use an older file path that keeps the GPS data.
• Copy the photo to a computer over a USB cable and upload it from a desktop browser. This always works, because nothing is stripped along the way.
• Upload from a cloud copy stored at original quality (such as Google Drive), then open that file on a desktop.

Google has been testing an “include location” permission prompt for the Android photo picker. If it ships, Chrome uploads should keep their coordinates again.

Date and location are stored in separate parts of a photo’s metadata, so one can survive while the other is removed. A missing location usually means one of these:

• Location Services were off in the camera app when the photo was taken, so no coordinates were ever recorded.
• The phone had no GPS lock — common indoors, in basements, or on planes. The camera writes zeroes instead of a position.
• The photo was shared through an app such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, or Telegram, which delete all metadata.
• You are on Android using Chrome, where the system removes the coordinates (see the question above).

If Photo Trace detects that a photo still contains empty location tags, it will tell you the coordinates were stripped rather than never recorded.

WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram re-compress every image they send and discard the metadata in the process. The photo you receive is a new file that never had a date, location, or camera information — so there is nothing for any tool to read. Filenames like WhatsApp_Image_2026-07-27_at_22_00_08.jpeg or IMG-20260727-WA0001.jpg are a reliable sign of this.

Screenshots behave the same way. A screenshot records what was on your display, not the original photo, so it carries only the time the screenshot was taken.

To see real data, use the original file straight from the camera — typically named something like IMG20260728103237.jpg.

No. Reading the date and location happens entirely inside your browser using JavaScript. Your photo is never sent to a server, never stored, and never leaves your device during that step.

Two features do contact outside services, and only with limited information:

• Place names: if a photo contains coordinates, those numbers alone are sent to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to look up an address. The photo itself is never sent.
• AI scene description: this is optional and runs only when you press the button. Pressing it sends a reduced-size copy of the image to the AI model for that single request.

All of them, as far as the metadata allows. Photo Trace reads JPEG, HEIC/HEIF, PNG, WebP, and TIFF files.

Manufacturers store coordinates in several different formats, and Photo Trace handles each one — including Apple iOS, Google Pixel, Samsung One UI, Xiaomi HyperOS, OnePlus OxygenOS, OPPO ColorOS, Realme UI, Vivo FunTouch and OriginOS, Honor MagicOS, Motorola, Nothing OS, Sony Xperia, ASUS ZenUI, Huawei HarmonyOS, Fairphone, and the Tecno, Infinix, and Itel range.

The coordinates come from the photo itself, so Photo Trace shows exactly what your camera recorded. Small errors are normal: a phone can be accurate to a few metres outdoors but drift much further indoors, between tall buildings, or when the GPS had only just started up when you pressed the shutter.

The address is a separate step. Photo Trace asks OpenStreetMap which place is nearest to those coordinates, and in areas with sparse mapping the closest named place may be some distance away. The coordinates and the map link remain accurate even when the place name is approximate.

Not with Photo Trace — it only reads metadata and never modifies your files. Once coordinates have been stripped by a messaging app or by Android, they are gone from that copy and cannot be recovered from it.

If you still have the original file (on the phone that took the photo, in a cloud backup at original quality, or on a computer), that copy will normally still contain the coordinates.

It is the camera’s own clock reading at the moment the shutter fired, recorded as local time. Photo Trace shows it exactly as written, so a photo taken at 9:58 PM in Bengaluru reads 9:58 PM wherever you view it.

Where the photo records one, the UTC offset is shown beside the date — for example (UTC+05:30). That tells you which time zone the camera was set to, which matters when you are sorting photos from a trip that crossed zones. If the photo does not store the offset directly, Photo Trace works it out by comparing the local capture time against the GPS satellite clock, which is always in UTC.

If a camera’s clock was set incorrectly, or was never adjusted after travelling, the recorded time carries that error — there is no way to detect this from the file alone.

Yes. When you tap Select Photo(s), choose as many images as you like rather than just one. Photo Trace loads them as a set and you can step through them without reopening the picker — the link below the preview becomes Choose Next Photo, and arrows appear so you can move back and forth. A counter shows which photo you are on.

Every selected photo is shown in turn, including any that have no location recorded. Those still display their date and camera details, with an explanation of why the location is missing rather than being skipped over.

If your gallery only lets you pick one at a time, that is your phone’s gallery app rather than this site. Try long-pressing the first photo to switch into selection mode, or pick Google Photos or Files when Android asks which app to open. Some manufacturer gallery apps ignore the browser’s request for multiple selection entirely.

Photo Trace does not impose a limit — the cap comes from your phone or computer’s photo picker. Android’s system picker generally allows around 100 photos, though some manufacturer gallery apps stop well short of that. On a desktop browser you can select many hundreds without trouble.

Selecting a large batch will not slow the page down. Only the photo you are currently viewing is actually read; the rest are held as lightweight references until you reach them. Browsing two hundred photos uses roughly the same memory as browsing five.

The Camera panel shows the settings your camera recorded at the moment it took the photo:

• Make / Model — the device that took the picture, such as OnePlus Nord 2T 5G. Useful for confirming which phone or camera a photo came from.
• Lens — the lens make and model, where the camera records it. Most phones leave this blank; interchangeable-lens cameras usually fill it in.
• Flash — whether the flash fired, and in what mode. This is more detailed than a simple on or off: a photo may report did not fire, forced off, meaning flash was deliberately suppressed, or fired, auto, meaning the camera decided it was needed.
• Aperture — how wide the lens opened, written as an f-number such as f/1.88. Lower numbers let in more light and blur the background more.
• Shutter speed — how long the sensor was exposed, such as 1/100s. Faster speeds freeze movement; slower ones let in more light but can blur.
• Dimensions — the pixel size of the image and its megapixel count.

Rows only appear when the photo actually contains that information, so the panel will be shorter for some images. If nothing is present at all, the photo has had its metadata stripped — typically because it is a screenshot or was shared through a messaging app.