How to Remove EXIF and GPS Data From Photos

What your camera writes into every photo

Every time a camera or phone saves a picture, it embeds a block of structured data alongside the pixels. The standard is called EXIF, short for Exchangeable Image File Format, and it was designed to help photographers understand how a shot was taken. It records the camera make and model, the lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, and the exact date and time down to the second.

On a phone, it usually records considerably more. If location services were enabled for the camera, the file contains GPS coordinates accurate to within a few metres, along with altitude and sometimes compass direction. Some devices add the phone's unique identifiers, the software version, and in certain cases an owner name configured during setup.

When this becomes a real problem

For a photographer reviewing their own archive, EXIF is genuinely useful. The risk appears when files leave your control, because most people have no idea the data is travelling with the image.

The scenarios below are not hypothetical; they are the common ways location data leaks in practice.

• Selling an item online with photos taken at home, where the coordinates point to your front door.
• Posting pictures of children and revealing the location of a school or playground on a regular schedule.
• Sharing holiday photos while away, which simultaneously confirms your home is empty.
• Sending a document scan or ID photo where the timestamp contradicts what you told the recipient.
• Publishing images from a confidential site, office, or unreleased product location.
• Journalists or activists sharing material that could identify a source's whereabouts.

Social networks are not a reliable safeguard

It is often said that social platforms strip EXIF automatically. Several major ones do remove most metadata from images displayed publicly, but this should not be treated as protection. Behaviour varies between platforms, between upload paths such as app versus web, and over time as products change. Direct messages, cloud storage links, and email attachments typically preserve metadata entirely.

More importantly, the platform stripping data for public display does not mean the platform did not receive and retain it. If your concern is what a company holds rather than what strangers can download, removing the data before upload is the only approach that actually works.

How to check what a photo contains

Before stripping anything, it is worth seeing what is actually there, because the result is often surprising.

1. On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties, and open the Details tab.
2. On macOS, open the image in Preview, then choose Tools followed by Show Inspector and select the GPS tab if present.
3. On iPhone, open the photo, swipe up or tap the information button, and look for a map beneath the image.
4. On Android, open the photo in Google Photos and tap the information icon to see location and camera details.

Removing it

The Remove Image Metadata tool on this site re-encodes the image through a canvas, which produces a new file containing the pixels and nothing else. Camera fields, timestamps, and GPS coordinates are not carried across. Because the work happens in your browser, the photo containing the location you are trying to protect is never uploaded to a server in order to have that location removed, which would rather defeat the purpose.

Two things worth knowing. First, this is not the same as blurring faces or removing identifying detail from the visible image; if a street sign or house number is in frame, you still need to crop or edit it out. Second, stripping metadata is irreversible in the exported copy, so keep your original if the camera settings matter to you.

Preventing it at the source

If you routinely share photos, turning off location tagging in the camera app is more reliable than remembering to strip files afterwards. On iPhone this lives under Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, then Camera, where you can set access to Never. On most Android devices it is a location toggle inside the camera app's own settings.

You lose the convenience of a map view in your photo library, which some people value highly. A reasonable middle ground is to leave tagging on for personal archiving and strip metadata deliberately whenever a photo is about to be shared publicly.