How to remove location from photos before sharing

What a photo file can give away

Every photo from a phone carries a block of hidden information called EXIF, and often XMP data next to it. What’s in it depends on the phone and its settings:

Stored in the photo	What it tells someone
GPS latitude and longitude, often altitude and direction	Where you stood, usually to within a few metres
Date and time taken	When you were there
Phone make and model, lens, settings	Which phone you use
Editing app	What you edited it with
A small preview image	Sometimes the photo before you cropped it
Depth maps, HDR gain maps, motion photo video	Extra pictures with their own metadata, and a few seconds of video

The location is the part that matters. A photo of your new sofa, your child’s first day at school or a bike you’re selling can show exactly which house it was taken in.

Who removes it for you, and who doesn’t

Some services strip metadata when you post, but you can’t count on it:

• Facebook and Instagram remove it from the copy other people see. TidBITS reported, with Facebook’s confirmation, that the company reads the location itself before stripping it.
• Google Photos leaves locations out of shared links and new shared albums by default. But a photo you download or send on from Google Photos shows the original location your phone saved, Google says.
• Email, AirDrop, cloud links, USB sticks, and messaging apps when you send a photo as a file or document, pass on the original file with everything in it.
• Marketplaces, forums and small sites vary, and many keep it.

Removing the location yourself, before the photo leaves your phone or computer, is the only way to be sure.

On iPhone

1. Remove it when you share. Select the photos in Photos, tap the Share button, then tap Options at the top and turn off Location. “Location Not Included” then shows above Options. You have to do this each time you share.
2. Remove it from the photo itself. Open the photo, tap the More button, tap Adjust Info, then Adjust Location, then No Location.
3. Stop new photos getting a location. Open Settings and go to Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera, then choose Never.

Turning off Camera location means the Photos map and trip memories no longer know where photos were taken. Many people prefer to keep it on and remove the location when sharing.

On Android

1. Samsung Galaxy: in the Gallery app, select the photos, tap Share, tick Remove location data, then pick the app. This works on One UI 3.0 and later.
2. Stop new photos getting a location: open your camera app’s settings and switch off location. Google lists the setting names by brand: “Save location” on Pixel, Motorola and Sony, “Location tags” on Samsung, “Save location info” on Xiaomi and “Store location data” on OnePlus.
3. Google Photos: Google says that if your camera added the location, “you can’t update or remove the location in Google Photos”, and it stays in photos you send elsewhere. For those, use a tool that removes it from the file.

On Windows and Mac

• Windows: right-click the photo, choose Properties, open the Details tab and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. Choose Create a copy with all possible properties removed and click OK. Check the copy’s Details tab afterwards: people on Microsoft’s Q&A forum report that it doesn’t always remove the location.
• Mac: in the Photos app, select the photos and choose Image > Location > Hide Location. When you export with File > Export, leave Location Information unticked. Preview’s Tools > Show Location Info shows whether a single photo has a location.

Remove the location from many photos at once, in your browser

1. Open tuul.io/exif-remover in any browser on your phone or computer.
2. Add your JPG, PNG or WebP photos: drag them onto the page, or tap Choose files and pick them from your gallery or a folder. Add as many as you like.
3. Read each photo’s row. It lists what was removed, such as “Removed GPS location (51.5007, -0.1246), camera (Apple iPhone 15), date taken”.
4. Download the clean copies one by one, or all of them as one ZIP file, and send those instead of the originals.

The photos are cleaned on your device and never uploaded, which matters here: uploading a photo to remove its location would hand the location to whoever runs the server. The picture itself isn’t re-saved, so its quality is byte-for-byte the same. The tool keeps the colour profile and the one setting that keeps photos upright, and removes everything else: EXIF, XMP, IPTC, comments and PNG text. It also cleans the extra images some phones store inside a photo, and removes a motion photo’s short video, which carries its own location. Every cleaned file is scanned again, and if any location were left, you’d get an error instead of a download.

Two limits to know:

• HEIC photos from an iPhone can’t be cleaned as HEIC yet. Convert them on tuul.io/heic-to-jpg, which leaves all metadata, location included, out of the JPG.
• Videos carry a location too. MOV to MP4 and the video trimmer leave it out of the files they make, and keep the recording date.

What metadata can’t hide

Removing the location doesn’t change what’s in the picture. Google’s own help page warns that people “can guess the location based on landmarks in your photo”. Before posting, look for house numbers, street signs, car number plates, a school badge, the view from a window, or a letter on the table, and crop or blur them.

Sources

• Apple Personal Safety User Guide: Manage location metadata in Photos: sharing without location, No Location, and the Camera location setting.
• Samsung Support: Removing location data from photos in the Gallery.
• Google Photos Help: Change your camera location settings: the setting’s name on each Android brand.
• Google Photos Help: Understand, find and edit your photos’ locations: what Google Photos can and can’t remove.
• Google Photos Help: How Google Photos protects your location data: what shared links and albums include.
• Microsoft Q&A: Remove Properties fails to remove location info.
• TidBITS: How to keep Facebook from snooping on your photos’ locations (May 2021).