Not everyone snaps a selfie every time they go to the bathroom, so no, a lot of us can’t get the same functionality by mapping photos.
That is not to say your device can’t keep a location history without sending it to someone’s server.
That is not to say your device can’t keep a location history without sending it to someone’s server.
Want to remember your e.g. hotel room number, parking garage floor/zone, or bus stop? Snap. Backup your plane ticket? Snap it. Record the wiring before an upgrade? Snap. To input your dietary nutrition later? Food picture. Part/model number? That's a picture. See behind something? Etc, etc.
The fact you only think smartphone cameras are for "bathroom selfies" (?) says more about you than whomever you're trying to disparage, because you're obviously under-utilizing an extremely valuable tool in your pocket because you've put it into a tiny box and dismissed it.
When I go to a restaurant I don't like taking pictures of the food, or pictures of the restaurant. I like enjoying the food and the company I'm with - but maybe I'm regressive.
I don’t need to remember my hotel room number or parking garage zone or bus stop every day. Even when I do I don’t need a photo, sorry, got a pretty good memory, and a digital notebook too. Under-utilize, sure, whatever, it’s my fucking phone and I didn’t ask you to judge. The fact is me and a whole host of people I know who don’t snap photos frequently enough (yeah, been talking to quite some friends about how we’ve basically been spending a fair bit of money on cameras that we don’t use very much) won’t get “the same functionality” as you were claiming, so I hope you’re not on a design panel for something like this where people who don’t conform to your expected usage pattern just get a FU.
Also: who the hell keep those parking garage photos around?
Storage is cheap. Having the image for some currently-undefined later use can be invaluable. Never using it later is cheaper than the opportunity cost of knowing it was there but now isn't.
I do! Although, that's because I don't take a lot of pictures, and I look at them even less, so they just accumulate. But it's rarely become a space issue (because I'm not taking many), so whatever. The act of taking the picture seals the memory, so I don't usually have to look.