Google strips it out. As a work around people have been using the "sync to Drive" feature, which allows downloading of photos with the GPS data in-tact. But now that's going away...
There are two possibilities I can think of. (1) Scrape the location from the web app, or (2) maybe Google Takeout for Google Photos leaves the location metadata intact? Feel free to discuss here: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/38
Why not use Nextcloud's auto-upload feature and get a copy of the image without any intermediary mangling the file? Seems best if your looking to have a backup of your data...
I've been using Google Photo's as an easy way to make sure my images are safely "in the cloud" for several years. I've only recently got around to try and sync my library down onto my computer. Google Photos has several limitations I dislike, the lack of GPS data being only the latest one I'm learning about, but it does the job of syncing whenever internet is available pretty good. I'm not looking to move to another system I have to maintain.
