Location data
Does your photo reveal your location?
Probably, if it came off a phone with location services switched on and has not been through a service that strips it. The coordinates sit in the file's GPS tags, they are usually accurate to a few metres, and nothing about opening the photo reveals that they are there.
Find out in about ten seconds
Open the Metadata tab, drop the photo in, and read the result. It is a viewer, not a cleaner: the file is read, displayed and discarded, and nothing is written or changed. If GPS tags are present you get the latitude and longitude in signed decimal degrees, along with links to open the spot in Google Maps or OpenStreetMap and a button to copy the raw coordinates.
The map is a link you press, not an embedded frame. An embedded map would send your coordinates to a tile server the moment the page loaded, whether or not you wanted that, which would be an odd thing for a privacy tool to do.
Two details worth knowing. Southern and western hemispheres come back as negative numbers,
which is correct and not an error. And a reading of exactly 0, 0 is treated as a
broken tag rather than shown as a location, because that point is in the ocean off West Africa
and effectively always means the tag was written wrong.
Where this catches people out
- Selling something online. A photo of an item for sale, taken at home, sent directly to a buyer, carries your home coordinates.
- Attachments rather than uploads. Big platforms usually strip GPS on upload. Email attachments, small forums, file sharing links and chat apps that send the file as a document generally do not.
- Old photos. People turn location off after learning about this, but every photo already in the library still has it.
- Screenshots of maps. A screenshot has no GPS tags, but the map it shows may be centred on the place you were looking at, which is often the same thing.
Removing it
Once you know it is there, the Images tab strips it. The default clears every tag, GPS included, and there is no re-encoding, so the picture itself is unchanged. The original file you dropped in is never modified; you download a cleaned copy alongside it.
If you want to keep the ordinary camera data and remove only AI provenance, the Keep non-AI metadata option does that. Note that it keeps GPS as well, since GPS is ordinary camera metadata. If your concern is location, leave that option off.
Turning it off at the source
Cleaning files one at a time works, but not writing the coordinates in the first place is better. On iPhone this is Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, Camera, set to Never. On Android it is the Camera app's own settings, usually a "location tags" or "save location" toggle. Both leave your existing photos untouched, so the old ones still need cleaning.
Check afterwards
Run the cleaned file back through the Metadata tab. It should come back with no GPS group at all. Verifying takes a few seconds and turns an assumption into a fact.