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How to Remove Location (GPS) from Photos Before Sharing

4 min readUpdated 5 October 2026

To remove location from photos, open Photo Privacy and drop your photos in. Any photo that carries GPS gets a red Location found badge with its coordinates. Press Remove metadata on a photo — or Clean all & ZIP for a batch — and you get clean copies with the location and other hidden data stripped out.

It's free, needs no account and works in any browser on a phone or a computer. Since the whole point is privacy, it matters that your photos never leave your device: they're checked and cleaned in the browser, not uploaded.

Do it now with Photo PrivacyFree, no sign-up, works on any device.

Step by step

  1. 1Open Photo Privacy and add photosGo to the Photo Privacy tool and drop photos onto the page, or click to choose them. JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC are supported, and you can add several at once.
  2. 2Check what each photo revealsBadges show what was found: Location found, owner name or serial number, date, camera and a hidden thumbnail. Photos with GPS also show the coordinates and an Open map link; All tags lists everything.
  3. 3Choose the cleaning optionsLeave Keep colour profile on — it keeps colours accurate and holds no personal data. For rotated phone photos, Keep rotation tag is lossless; Rotate pixels removes every tag but re-encodes the photo.
  4. 4Remove the metadataPress Remove metadata (Clean on a phone) on one photo, or Clean all & ZIP to clean every photo at once — with a single photo the button reads Clean & download. Clean copies get “-clean” added to their names.
  5. 5Share the clean copySend the “-clean” file, not the original. Send clean copy to… passes it straight to another image tool, for example to shrink it before you post it.

What a photo can give away

Phones save extra details, called EXIF metadata, inside every photo. Depending on the phone and its settings, that can include:

  • GPS location — often precise enough to pinpoint a house, a school or a regular café.
  • Date and time the photo was taken, to the second.
  • Phone or camera model, lens and settings.
  • Sometimes the owner's name or the camera's serial number, plus a small hidden thumbnail of the image.

Tip: Removing metadata doesn't change what's visible in the picture. A street sign, a house number or a school uniform can still give a location away — check the photo itself too.

Doesn't the app remove it anyway?

Many social networks strip location data from photos when you post them, but not every app or website does, and it's hard to tell which. Photos sent as a file or document, attached to an email, or shared from cloud storage usually arrive with all their original data.

Cleaning a photo yourself takes a few seconds and removes the guesswork — worth it for anything taken at home, at your children's school or anywhere you go regularly.

Stop your phone adding location in the first place

On iPhone, go to Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services › Camera and choose Never. When you share from the Photos app, you can also tap Options at the top of the share sheet and turn off Location for that share.

On Android, open the Camera app's settings and turn off the option that saves location — it's named differently depending on the phone maker, such as location tags or save location. Photos you've already taken keep their location, so clean those before sharing.

Quality, formats and HEIC photos

JPEG and PNG photos are cleaned losslessly: the metadata blocks are cut out and the pixels are untouched. WebP and HEIC photos are re-encoded, and HEIC photos come out as JPEG.

If you see “This browser can't decode HEIC”, export the photo as JPEG first, or set your iPhone to Settings › Camera › Formats › Most Compatible so new photos are saved as JPEG. To make clean photos smaller before posting, send them on to Image Converter; to post several as one picture, use Collage Maker.

Questions people ask

How do I know if my photo has location data?
Drop it into Photo Privacy. Photos with GPS show a red Location found badge with the coordinates; photos with nothing hidden show No metadata found.
Can I remove only the GPS location and keep the date?
No. The tool removes all metadata, including location, date, camera details and owner name. Only the colour profile, and optionally the rotation tag, are kept.
Does removing EXIF data reduce photo quality?
Not for JPEG and PNG — the metadata is cut out and the pixels stay exactly the same. WebP and HEIC are re-encoded, with a tiny quality loss.
Can I clean many photos at once?
Yes. Add all the photos you want to clean and press Clean all & ZIP. You get one ZIP file with a clean copy of every photo.
Are my photos uploaded?
No. Photos are read and cleaned in your browser and never uploaded to a server.
Do it now with Photo PrivacyFree, no sign-up, works on any device.

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