Location

Take the location out of your photos

A phone with location services on writes the coordinates of where you stood into every photo it takes, accurate to a few metres. The picture of a new kitchen says where the kitchen is. The picture of a child in a garden says which garden. There are three things to do about it: stop the phone writing it, remove it from the photos you already have, and check.

Stop it being written

iPhone. Open Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Location Services, then Camera, and choose Never. Photos taken from then on carry no coordinates. If you want the location for your own library but not for what you share, leave it on and instead turn off Location in the Options at the top of the share sheet each time you send a photo.

Android. Open the camera app, open its settings, and turn off the option named something like Save location or Location tags. The exact wording differs by maker. Some phones also ask in the system Location settings, under the camera app's permission.

Changing a setting does nothing to the photos already taken. Those still carry the coordinates they were taken with.

Remove it from photos you already have

Open the tool on the Images tab, drop the photos in and press Clean. The GPS block is removed along with every other tag, and the picture itself is copied across untouched. You can drop several at once and download them together. If you would rather keep the camera and date details for your own records, the Keep ordinary file details option keeps those and removes only AI tags, so leave it off when the location is what you want gone.

The phone's own photo app can also drop the location from a single picture through its adjust or edit menu. That works one photo at a time and does not help with a file that has already left the phone.

Check it is gone

Drop the cleaned photo into the Metadata tab. If there is still a location, the report shows it on a map. If there is not, there is no map and no coordinates block. The photo location guide goes through what the report shows.

What happens when you send a photo

Sending a picture through a service that re-encodes it, which is what most social networks and chat apps do for pictures, strips the location before anyone else sees it. Sending a picture as a file, by email, cloud link, or as a document attachment, keeps everything. The social media and email guide lists the common cases. When in doubt, clean first, then send. It costs nothing and there is no way to unsend.

Video too

Phone videos carry a location atom in the same way. They are read on the Metadata tab and cleaned on the Video tab without re-encoding.

Common questions

Open the tool