Well if you want to pry the technicality of gps, so be it. You said that you want to use the photo, at least for the current general tech, it's impossible for at least civilian, I guess. The photo need to be geotag if you want use gps, else it's just tracking an ip even if you manage to trace. Signal and ip are 2 different things. Sure it connected, but it's more of a hassle to hack it with only ordinary android. As the story goes so far, even conan is not really an I.T expert, and prof agasa hasnt give him anything.
Unless you could explain how one could easily tracked a send photo location via android, I still think it was really a useless dumb idea to suggest at least for this case, which happened in mid of mountain with so many variables that could hindered a signal that could be access easily by civilians.