■ Backup phone photos preserving GPS location information

Have you noticed that sometimes JPG picture location information works while the photo is kept inside your mobile phone, but somehow disappears when you extract (share) said photo and use it outside your phone? — e.g. store it in your hard disk. GPS geolocation tags are handy to show photos on a map and even search for photos using a map with DeskRule search tool, so you don't want to lose them when you backup your phone pics.

Apparently the culprit is your phone's privacy settings, which by default strip location details when you share photos, e.g. using bluetooth or when you post them on Facebook. If you examine your Android phone's secure sharing settings (sorry I don't know the equivalent setting for iOS phones), they remove GPS EXIF tags by default — for people who don't mind sharing their faces but object to revealing their location (talking about fallacy!)

I have examined such GPS-cleansed photos with online metadata viewers, and a mysterious GPSInfoIFDPointer is left behind but without any GPSLatitude etc tags. I doubt the leftover pointer points to valid location data in the JPG header... or does it?

When extracting photos from your phone to your own computer, there is a way to avoid GPS info massacre, avoiding sharing (ineffective for lots of photos anyroad), and using your computer's file manager (say xplorer² :) for transfer, bypassing the Android JPG sharing restrictions. An older blog post explains how to copy pictures from your phone, but here is a quick recap:

Direct photo access. This is the preferred approach. If your phone has a mini SD card or similar removable storage for photos, remove the card from the phone and insert it in your laptop's card reader (an external drive letter will be added). Then copy the photos using xplorer², quickly and easily
USB connection. If you want to access photos in your phone's own storage, connect it by cable and you will see your phone appear under ThisPC folder. Drill down to a folder called DCIM\Camera where the pics and videos are stored, and then copy them out using xplorer² dual pane mode (see snapshot below). This so-called MTP connection is slower than direct SD card access, but it also works.
If you can't see any files or folders in the phone, make sure you accept the USB connection from your phone's notifications.
Make sure you allow full access to the phone's files and folders, not just camera photos

browsing phone pics and videos

After the end of the transfer, double check the file properties of the backed up JPG photos. You should see location info in the details tab. Now you can use GPS tags in xplorer² and Deskrule like Magellan!

Only xplorer² ultimate can show GPS information, importing the properties System.GPS.LatitudeDecimal and System.GPS.LongitudeDecimal using Advanced settings editor