I would bet it would still do well. You can give a frontier LLM photos that it has never seen before and it will reason about them incredibly accurately, since is is trained on, well, a lot of other similar photos. You can easily try it yourself, give o3 a photo you have taken yourself of a random place, it will crop, zoom and analyze different sections of the photo until it gets most of the time the exact coordinates of where the photo was taken.

> are those photos already in the training data that the model was trained on?

The photos are of course in the training data. Most humans too, would have seen a large fraction of these photos before.

But associating it with a year is where the magic happens.

You are dismissing a technology capability that was science fiction a year or two ago.