The almost exclusive reason I never bought a DSLR is because nobody ever saw the reason to add a GPS chip to encode exif data into the pictures being taken. Sure, you could sometimes buy another device and plug it into your already large device you have to lug around to get that metadata. I just never wanted to deal with all that for something so fundamental to digital photography in my mind. I could however see the trade-off of the larger form factor for the lenses. I was not going to lug around and keep plugging in a GPS module though.
To me, going back 20+ years now I have been convinced that the metadata is as important as the images themselves. I just got tired of looking into it every few years, getting disappointed, and trying to remember to go look again next year. Seemed like phone cameras could deliver more of that baseline for digital images should be underneath the lenses. When I look back on my images I don't want to guess where they were taken or hope that the timestamps were right. Using a DSLR was too risky to me. Too much information about an image was lost like the most critical bits of coordinates and accurate timestamps.
Canon 6D was one of the few DSLRs that had built-in GPS support, but the feature wasn’t that successful since most people preferred to keep it off to save battery life.
100% support this. It's unbelievable that my 100k+ DSLR photos over 15 years are not connected to their location when it would have been so easy. (I would have gladly carried a multiple pound extra battery to support always-on GPS).
For starters, consult the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cameras_which_provide_... . Most photographers I talked to have the opposite stance as you - they care about grouping photos by event (vacation, portrait session, hiking, etc.) but don't care about the exact street. As you are in the minority, I can see why the cameras are not reliably released with geotagging features.
I've used several cameras with geotagging capabilities and I'd like to describe their quirks:
* Canon EOS 6D: Built-in GPS receiver. Drains a lot of battery, especially if you set the update interval very short (1 second, 10, 60, etc.). Takes unreasonably long to first acquire location (easily 2~10 minutes). The weak receiver struggles with urban canyons and airplane windows - phones have much better receivers. Sometimes calculates completely wrong coordinates that are ~10 km away. As a result, some photos don't have geotags (slow acquisition) and some are wrong. But the extra transfer step is mildly annoying.
* Canon EOS M6: Make sure camera has the correct time set (can't be off by hours and days). Run the "Canon Camera Connect" phone app and enable continuous location logging. After shooting (e.g. end of day), use Wi-Fi to connect phone and camera, and use the app to apply geotags onto the photos after the fact. My phone is extremely accurate (GPS+GLONASS) and supports indoor geolocation through Wi-Fi, so essentially 100% of photos get tagged and mistagging is rare.
* Canon EOS RP: Use Bluetooth to pair the camera with the phone. Must run the "Canon Camera Connect" phone app in the background while shooting. Periodically check that the phone OS didn't evict the app due to inactivity, quite annoyingly. Every time you turn on the camera, wait 2~10 seconds for it to connect to the phone, and then you'll get geolocation data at the time of shooting. If the connection failed for whatever reason, you cannot go back and add geotags to photos after the fact.
Even though the Canon app can connect to all 3 aforementioned cameras over Wi-Fi, their geotagging functionalities are completely non-overlapping. You cannot send geotags to the 6D at all. You cannot geotag the M6 in real time. You cannot send geotags to the RP after a photo is shot.
By contrast, when you shoot a photo on a phone, it gets geotagged automatically with no fuss. The phone's accurate GPS+GLONASS+WiFi sensors are used (unlike the slow and inaccurate 6D), you don't have to do manual actions after shooting (unlike the M6 synchronization), and you don't need to wait because the phone geolocation service is always ready (unlike the 6D and RP).
To me, going back 20+ years now I have been convinced that the metadata is as important as the images themselves. I just got tired of looking into it every few years, getting disappointed, and trying to remember to go look again next year. Seemed like phone cameras could deliver more of that baseline for digital images should be underneath the lenses. When I look back on my images I don't want to guess where they were taken or hope that the timestamps were right. Using a DSLR was too risky to me. Too much information about an image was lost like the most critical bits of coordinates and accurate timestamps.