Effective?
Many hotels and long-term residence inns over here have very similar looking rooms based on the age of the building. So the rooms will look the same except for some minor differences in decor and bedding. Differences that will change over time. Plus, if one is careful about what is in the picture, there is less useful information than one might suppose. Framing the picture is not that difficult.
As far as using the photo meta-data, it depends if the miscreant is smart enough to remove it and set the date deliberately wrong on a camera.
At best that might eliminate locations but I doubt is will very good at positively identifying a location. Valuable to a point, you know what you can safely ignore but is not by itself definitive.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
