How to remove GPS location from photos before sharing

Why it matters

With location services on, phones write the coordinates of each photo into its EXIF data. A picture of your front door, a child's school or your desk at home can reveal an address to anyone who receives the original file. No special skills are needed: many photo viewers show the location on a map.

Remove it in three steps

1. Optional: open the photo in the Metadata Viewer to see whether it contains coordinates and where they point.
2. Open Remove Location and drop one or more JPG, PNG or WebP photos.
3. Download the cleaned copies. Camera details, dates and the colour profile stay, and the GPS data is gone.

Location only, or everything?

Remove Location suits photos you want to keep in a library with their dates and camera settings. If you are sharing with strangers, Remove Metadata with All metadata is safer: it also removes the capture time, device model, serial numbers, editing history and the embedded thumbnail.

How the removal works

In a JPG, the GPS section inside the EXIF block is wiped and the rest of the file is copied byte for byte, so the image is not re-encoded and loses no quality. PNG and WebP store EXIF as one block, so the whole EXIF block is removed from those files. Remove Location does not accept HEIC; use Remove Metadata for HEIC photos, which re-encodes them at high quality without metadata.

Things that can still give a location away

• Some editing apps copy coordinates or place names into XMP or IPTC fields. Remove Location clears only the EXIF GPS data, so check the result in the Metadata Viewer and use Remove Metadata if a location remains.
• The picture itself: street signs, house numbers, landmarks, number plates and reflections. Crop or redact them.
• Copies you already shared, uploaded or backed up keep their original metadata.

Stop adding location at the source

On iPhone, go to Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera and choose Never. The iPhone share sheet also has an Options button with a switch to leave out location for a single share. On Android, open the camera app's settings and turn off location tags; the exact wording varies by phone maker.