Good to know that may still be an issue. My son was using sharing from Google Photos to the Android app for photos taken with a GPS equipped GoPro 7 Black (e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/34226228) and the photos appear in the app edit screen with a blank location field. Note that the photos are locally available, they were loaded from the GoPro to an SD card that was then inserted into his Motorola G6 Moto which has been updated to Android 9. The phone is doing the synching to Google Photos. In Google Photos the photos are geolocated, thus there is geolocation data apparently extant in the original image. Either the data was stripped out by Google on export or perhaps the GoPro7 uses some sort of custom geolocation EXIF tag that Google mapping can read. This is somewhat tangentially related to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/google-photos-import-is-currently-not-functional/65, although that was specifically referencing the web site.
I advised him to try importing photos from the SD card using the iNaturalist app rather than sharing from Google Photos, and he will be trying that. He noted that the number of images he has makes using Google Photos sharing easier.
Please pardon that this may not be on topic for this particular thread.