How to Remove the Location From a Photo Before You Share It

Your phone almost certainly records where each photo was taken. That's what lets your gallery show your pictures on a map. It also means that a photo sent by email, AirDrop or a file-sharing link can carry the exact spot where you were standing, which is very often your home.

Social networks usually remove this data when you post. Plenty of other ways of sharing don't. Here's how to take it out yourself.

iPhone

To remove the location from a photo you're about to send, open the share sheet and tap Options at the top, just under the preview. Turn off Location and share as usual. The copy you send has no coordinates, and the photo in your library keeps them.

You can also remove it from a photo in your library for good. Swipe up on the photo to see its details, tap Adjust next to the map, then choose No Location.

To stop saving locations at all, go to Settings, then Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera, and choose Never. New photos won't be geotagged from then on.

Android

The menus differ from one brand to another, but the idea is the same. Most camera apps, including Google Camera and Samsung's, have a setting to save or tag the location. Turn it off and new photos won't have one.

For photos you already have, Samsung's Gallery offers to remove location data on its share screen. In Google Photos, the info panel of a photo lets you edit or remove its location, and the app settings have an option to remove geo location from items you share by link.

Mac

Open the photo in Preview and choose Tools, then Show Inspector. If the photo has a location, you'll see a GPS tab with a Remove Location Info button. Click it, save, and it's gone. In the Photos app, Image, Location, Hide Location does the same for a photo in your library.

Windows

Right-click the file, choose Properties and open the Details tab. At the bottom there's a link called Remove Properties and Personal Information. It can either make a clean copy or let you tick the fields to delete from the original.

Lots of photos at once

Free command-line metadata tools can clean a whole folder in one go, removing the GPS fields from every image and keeping a backup of each original. That's worth setting up if you regularly share batches of photos. For one or two pictures, the methods above are simpler.

Check that it worked

Don't assume it did. Open the cleaned copy in Preview, the Windows Details tab or any metadata viewer, and make sure no GPS fields are left. You can also run it through PixTrace: if the report shows no location data in the file, the coordinates are gone.

One last thing. Removing the metadata doesn't hide what's in the picture. A street sign, the view from a window or a distinctive building can give a location away just as well. That's how photos with no GPS data at all still get located.

Try PixTrace on your own photos

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