A colleague of mine tried doing this after a large sturgeon die off in the San Francisco Bay a few years ago. Citizens were asked to upload photos of dead sturgeon washed up on beaches. They actually got pretty good data (sturgeon are very easily identifiable) and lots of participation, but the location data ending up being largely useless because it was fuzzed (I think by iOS?) to a large enough degree to no longer be helpful, and the fields for manual coordinate entry had very low usage

Oh that's fascinating. I hadn't considered OS-level fuzzing as a hurdle until now. I'm an pixel guy and typically I get decently-accurate location heatmaps in the Photos app when I search by location; I wonder how we would have handled this. HABs are so difficult, they break my heart.

How does iOS decide whether to default to including location?

I coulda sworn, even in earlier versions of iOS 26, if you told it not to include location when sending a photo once then it would not include it by default the next time.

Also I thought that when you uploaded a photo from your camera roll to the web I thought it defaulted to no location. And that seems to have changed too. (Of course, you can still tap a button to withhold location EXIF.)