Remove the GPS location from a photo

A phone with location access writes the exact latitude and longitude of where you were standing into every photo it takes, usually precise to a few metres. Share that file as-is and whoever receives it can read where it was taken: your home, your child's school, your workplace. The tool below strips the location out and shows you exactly what was there.

The tool removes all privacy-sensitive metadata in one pass: GPS, camera model, timestamps and embedded names. Pixels are never re-encoded.

When photos carry your location (and when they don't)

• Usually carries GPS: photos taken with a phone camera while location access for the camera is on (the default on many phones).
• Usually clean: screenshots (they're new files with no camera data), photos taken with location off, and images that already passed through a social network's upload pipeline.
• The trap: sending "as document" or "original quality" (e-mail, cloud links, some chat apps) skips the stripping that normal image-sending does; the recipient gets your original file, coordinates included.

Turn it off at the source

Removing GPS from photos you already took is what this page is for; preventing it in new photos is a phone setting. On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never (or "Ask"). On Android: open your Camera app's settings and disable the location/geo-tag toggle. Menus differ a little per version, but both platforms have the switch. Note that turning it off only affects new photos; everything in your camera roll keeps whatever was saved at the time.

Questions about the tools

The coordinates go, the picture doesn't change

Worth knowing how this is done, because the usual home-made alternatives cost you something and this doesn't. Location data lives in a separate container inside the file, alongside the image, not mixed into it. Removing it means rewriting that container and copying the image data across untouched — so the pixels in your cleaned photo are byte-for-byte the pixels you uploaded. No re-compression, no quality loss, no second lossy generation, whatever the format.

Two fields are deliberately kept, and it matters that they are:

• Orientation, the flag that says which way is up. Strip that along with everything else and a perfectly good portrait photo arrives sideways in half the apps that open it.
• The colour profile, which tells a screen how to interpret the colours. Throw it away and the photo looks flat or oddly saturated depending on where it's viewed.

Neither says anything about you, and both are needed to display the file correctly — so they stay while location, device, timestamps and author fields go.

Compare that with the workarounds people reach for. Screenshotting the photo does remove the coordinates, and costs you resolution, sharpness and often the aspect ratio. Opening and re-saving in an editor re-compresses the image and frequently writes a fresh software tag in place of the old one. Converting to another format strips metadata as a side effect, and re-encodes every pixel to do it. One deliberate exception here: TIFF files aren't accepted, because in a TIFF the metadata shares its structure with the image itself and a strip leaves the camera make and model behind. A half-cleaned file that says it's clean is worse than an honest refusal, so it's refused.

Coordinates aren't the only thing that gives away where you are

Removing the GPS data is the easy half. The picture itself is the half people forget, and on a marketplace listing or a rental ad it's where the actual leaks happen:

• A house number, a street sign, a bus stop or a shop across the road — visible in the background of the "look at this bike I'm selling" photo.
• The name on a doorbell, a letterbox or a parcel in the hallway.
• A number plate on the driveway, and a school logo on a uniform in a family photo.
• Reflections. A window, a mirror, a screen or a pair of glasses can hold the room, the street outside, or you holding the phone.
• The view from the window, which for a recognisable skyline or landmark is as good as an address.

And two things about timing that no metadata tool can fix for you: posting holiday photos while you're away tells people the house is empty, and a run of photos taken at the same time each day describes a routine. Both are choices about when you post, not about what's in the file.

So the checklist before a public post is short: strip the file, then look at the photo the way a stranger would — corners, background, reflections, anything with writing on it — and crop what doesn't need to be in frame. If something in the picture has to go, erasing an object handles what a crop can't reach.

Why the coordinates are shown, not just removed

The easy version of this tool would strip the location silently and say "done" — fewer lines of interface, same result in the file. We show the actual coordinates first because most people genuinely don't know their photo carries them until they see the number, and seeing it is what changes behaviour going forward, not just for that one file. It's also the only honest way to prove the tool worked: a "cleaned" claim with nothing to check against is just a claim. In practice the coordinates that surprise people most aren't holiday photos — those feel expected — it's the everyday ones: a child's school run, a delivery photo taken on the doorstep, a plant on a windowsill. None of those feel like "location photos" while you're taking them, which is exactly why the metadata is worth a look before the file leaves your device rather than after. One format note: Android phones more often let you turn camera location off at the OS level, while on iPhone the same setting lives one layer deeper, under the Camera app specifically rather than Location Services generally — which is why it gets missed.

Read on

The location is only one of the things a photo quietly carries: see what your photos reveal for the whole list, or the step-by-step EXIF removal guide. Want to check a photo without a specific worry? Use the metadata checker.

By Sam Ridder — I build and run ShinobiTools on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.