While that kludge with gadget does help somewhat with manual WWW access at beta cluster at https://commons.wikimedia.beta.wmcloud.org (thanks for that!), lack of working thumbnails on beta cluster is quite problematic for all other testing (e.g. for testing mobile app ), resulting in the problem that one can basically only test on production https://commons.wikimedia.org, which is rather unfortunate for a whole lot of reasons.

(As noted, having full complement of EXIF tags fixes that particular issue, so closing)

I'd prefer not to make this trade-off, since there's a decent set of category results that'd effectively be hidden by it.

I think this (or something more advanced) is really really needed.

In my particular case, it seems that while other software (like JOSM etc.) were happily accepting the .jpg files as georeferenced, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard didn't.