So far I found the fastest pipeline to get good results is to use Google Photos editor as a Google One subscriber. Most useful tools are Al sharpen, portrait blur, portrait lightong (not always good). Basic color/brightness tools work great.
Although I do miss some functionality like blur/pixelation brush (for anonymysation of faces and/or car plates), adding a png/ image overlay, colour replacement (and overall better grading tools), curves.
What’s do folks use for photo editing on Android?
[Meta] this should not violate rule 2 of the community since this thread may benefit current and future members, encourage discussions.
I believe the root cause of my issue is the weird way gallery apps behave on modern Android (A12 and A13). My phone is got Samsung’s gallery as the factory-set system gallery, Google Photos is considered third party, this creates lots of issues and I willing to bet metadata vanishing is one of them.