raccoondad
Thanks for your reply.
If anyone is looking for the settings, in Camera, they're a little tricky to find. On my phone, I had to go to Camera (as opposed to video/night/qr scan, and swipe down on the screen. There's some settings there, then there's a "more settings", which has the "Remove EXIF data after capture" on it.
However, it has a note saying "geo-tagging/location option is independent of this setting". Also, it's turned off for me.
In any case, the "ask every time" for location permission wasn't working, when I used the camera app, it never asked.
I switched to "always allow", and it still doesn't save the location info for me, at least I didn't see it in the viewer. Uploaded it into pic2map, doesn't show it there either. I guess it just never saves the info.
Anyway, it's not a big deal - i installed the regular Google Pixel camera as well, and will use that if I want to have locations saved.