By Shinobi Tools Team · Last updated: July 2026
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.
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.
Upload it above: if location data is present, the exact coordinates are shown before they're removed. If the photo was already clean, the tool says so.
Typically down to a few metres: precise enough to identify a home address. The file stores latitude and longitude (and often altitude) as measured at the moment the photo was taken.
Big social networks strip most metadata, including GPS, when a photo is uploaded or sent as a regular image. E-mail attachments, cloud-drive links, marketplaces and "send as document" usually keep the original file, GPS included.
No. Only the metadata sections of the file are rewritten; the image pixels are not re-encoded, and orientation plus the colour profile are kept so the photo still displays correctly.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.