How to Remove the Location From a Photo Before You Share It

Every photo your phone takes comes with a label you can’t see. It’s called EXIF, and it usually includes:

• where you took it, as a GPS position, often to within a few meters,
• when, to the second, with the time zone,
• what with: the phone or camera model, the lens and the software,
• sometimes who: an owner’s name, or the camera’s serial number.

Share the photo as a file, by email, in a chat app or on a marketplace listing, and that label often goes with it. A picture of the couch you’re selling can tell a stranger where the couch, and you, live.

See what your photo says

Open the photo in the image editor and click Hidden data. If the photo records where it was taken, the tab says so in red, with the latitude and longitude, followed by the date, the camera and anything else in the file. Try the sample Phone photo with a location to see a full example; its camera data and location are made up for the demo.

Remove it without losing quality

For a JPEG, PNG or WebP, click Save the original without it. You get a copy of the same file, byte for byte, with the metadata blocks taken out: the EXIF and GPS data, XMP, IPTC captions and comments. The picture isn’t re-compressed, so nothing about how it looks changes.

One thing stays: the orientation flag. Without it, a photo you took holding the phone sideways would suddenly lie on its side.

Or save a new file

Anything you save from the editor, after a crop or a filter or just as another format, is a new file with only the pixels. It never carries the location or other hidden data. The same goes for Convert many images: a whole set of photos, cleaned at once and returned as a ZIP.

All of it happens on your device. The photo isn’t uploaded to have its location removed, which would rather defeat the point.

Stop it at the source

• iPhone, one share: in the share sheet, tap Options at the top and turn off Location.
• iPhone, always: Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera > Never.
• Android: in the Camera app’s settings, turn off location tags (the name varies by phone maker).

You may want locations in your own library, to find holiday photos on a map. Then leave the camera alone and clean only the copies you share.

Key takeaways

• Phone photos record where, when and with what they were taken.
• The Hidden data tab shows it; Save the original without it removes it with no loss of quality.
• Every newly saved file is clean, and so is every batch conversion.
• Turn off camera location if you never want it, or clean only what you share.

See your photo’s hidden data →

Your users upload photos to your platform? We’ll build uploads that strip location and other personal data before the file ever leaves their device, and because we work with AI-assisted development, it costs far less than you might expect. Let’s talk.