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If you have location enabled on your phone, Google appears to cross reference your location with your photo timestamps to work out where you were. I know this because when I import my DSLR images to Google Photos it estimates the location, usually very accurately.

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I've also seen it geotag things based upon the content of the image alone.

I went to the photo store not long ago and had dozens of rolls of negatives scanned, from a vacation to Europe 20 years ago. I uploaded them into Google Photos and it geotagged many of them automatically.

They have a public API that does the same, it detects landmarks in images and can give you a lat/long position for it as well as a confidence score.

https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/detecting-landmarks

apple cloud did release a lot of celeb pics over the internet...let's not forget that

That was a phishing attack, nothing to do with Apple other than that the people attacked by it were iPhone users.

I discovered the same last week. I made a trip to Amsterdam some 11 years ago, and since then uploaded my entire photo library to Google Photos. Last week I was playing around and searched "Amsterdam" in Google Photos, whaddaya know, (most of my) photos from Amsterdam showed up, at least those with discernible features/buildings/landmarks.

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