How can Google Photos estimate where a photo was taken if the camera had no GPS?

Question

I uploaded photos from an older digital camera that does not record GPS/location data, but Google Photos still identified the correct city and sometimes an approximate place. The photos were uploaded later from a desktop. How can Google Photos infer location when the camera itself has no GPS?

user32811 · Accepted Answer

They can use machine learning to guess location from photo

Guessing the location of a randomly chosen Street View image is hard, even for well-traveled humans. But Google’s latest artificial-intelligence machine manages it with relative ease. [...] “PlaNet is able to localize 3.6 percent of the images at street-level accuracy and 10.1 percent at city-level accuracy,” say Weyand and co. What’s more, the machine determines the country of origin in a further 28.4 percent of the photos and the continent in 48.0 percent of them.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600889/google-unveils-neural-network-with-superhuman-ability-to-determine-the-location-of-almost/

Confirmed by uploading the sphinx picture (from wikipedia) with all EXIF information removed. After a while, the location was automatically changed to "Giza Necropolis". Obviously this information can't come from GPS, phone spying or timestamp matching and could only be derived from the photograph itself.

So, the good news is, google knowing the location of your photos does not necessarily mean you are being tracked without your permission. Your location can be seen because you are showing the location in your photos!

How can Google Photos estimate where a photo was taken if the camera had no GPS?

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