I discovered this recently and thought it was worth sharing. If you open a photo in Google Photos on your phone (mine is an Android) and swipe up you see the date, a place to add a caption etc.
At the bottom it shows Location with a small map.
If you tap on the image (not the Open in Maps link) , it opens the map and in addition to showing you the pin and location it shows you a heat map of your Google Photos in the area. Here are a couple of screenshots (at different zoom levels) of my hometown., This didn’t seem to work on my Windows desktop?
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Oh great sir, @Rednewt74
I tried and its really working…
We can identify the locations where we have added photos easily… 
Yes, @Rednewt74
I use the heatmap regularly.
The obvious use: to check where my next photo walk should take me. Looking for less photographed areas.
Secondly, if I’m having trouble finding the right pin to upload a photo to. This map shows me the precise location I took the photo. If the place is not on Google Maps it helps me add the new place accurately and get the address right.
Still I have to guess which direction I was pointing my camera.
As you can see I got Copenhagen pretty well covered. 
Cheers
Morten
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@Rednewt74 Thanks for sharing this to the community as it’s quite a hidden and often overlooked feature on Google Photos (on mobile only 
). I’d love to see this on the desktop version too as I use it from time to time to do a reverse lookup. For example, I recall taking a photograph of a store front in a particular neighbourhood but can’t remember exactly where and when. I’ll then find a photo that I know is from the area, pull up the heat map feature and browse photos taken in/around the area until I find the photo that I’m looking for. 
And for those who don’t know what the heat map represents, it’s a visual representation of the number of photos you’ve taken (and backed-up to Google Photos) based on their location. So if you don’t see any colour blobs on the Maps, it means you’ve not taken any photos in that area. Blue (or cool coloured) blobs show that you’ve taken at least 1 or a few photos there. The pink (or hot coloured) blobs shows a lot of photos were taken in that area.
Accuracy is dependent on your phone’s GPS accuracy. Sometimes in big cities with tall buildings, the location of my photos aren’t always accurate.
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@AdrianLunsong thanks for the explanation. But most important thing like you said is it only works for backed up photos. My storage is kinda exhausted and realised map isn’t available for newly clicked photos. I wish all the photos with location details could be traced like that very nifty feature to be honest.
@AdrianLunsong
Thank you for clarifying about what a heat map is, I should have included that. I live in a small town and I have 18,000 photos on the heat map. I have to really zoom in to figure out what’s what. Although that being said I was at a garden/farm stand that is a ways out of town, yesterday and when I took pictures I could see that I’d taken about 40 there over the past years.
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@Trail_blazer
After reading your comment I thought that there must be some way to access the data stored in the photos. I went looking on Goggle play and several apps. The first one I tried didn’t work and the GPS data was way down the list and blank. This one,
however worked first try. Not only can you copy the GPS data you can just go ahead and open it directly in Google Maps.
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@Rednewt74 yes there are many apps that read exif and meta data but the point is this can’t be used to reflect photos in heat map like you showed. You need to back up photos in Google photos to be reflected in heat map. Inevitably you need to stop back after hitting 15gb ceiling.
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@Trail_blazer
I realize I misunderstood you comment. You were commenting on not having the heat map feature for new photos rather than just being able to locate them on the Map from the GPS data. The 15gb limit was always problematic for me too. A couple of years ago I started shooting a lot of 4k video and broke down and started buying more storage.
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@Rednewt74 I shoot lots of photos. Thousands every year I know somewhere someday I gonna face problem of storage. I wish perk of 2TB storage somehow restructured to benefits LGs more efficiently.
@Trail_blazer @Rednewt74 I’ve coughed up an annual payment to get the 2TB capacity on Google Drive/Photos/etc. Unfortunately, I’ve started taking lots of videos now both for Google Maps and also my YouTube channel so much so that I had not much choice if I wanted the convenience of a cloud backup. The painful irony is that I also have portable drives (5TB) and I know how ‘cheap’ they are compared to cloud storage!! 
I could perhaps build my own NAS based storage but I then lose the features of Google Photos (somewhat easy search etc).
Also, I think/hope that in the near future, cloud storage services will bump up their lowest tier to a much higher limit since taking videos is so common now and with more and more folks shooting in 4K, bigger storage will be a huge incentive to choose a particular company’s offering.
@AdrianLunsong , @Trail_blazer
For the last year I have been working to keep my photo storage under (usual at about 90GB) the 100GB limit I had been paying for. Last December I got a Pixel 7 pro and shoot a lot of video in 4K. Recently we went to a Butterfly conservatory (Magic Wings) and all the video I shot there finally maxed me out, so I’ve just gone up to the next tier. The reliability and convenience is hard to beat and it gives me time to really look at what is worth keeping before loading them on to my computer to edit.
Hope you both are well.
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