How to remove GPS coordinates from photos

Why photos know where you were

Phones tag photos with coordinates so gallery apps can group pictures by place. It is a genuinely useful feature, and on most phones it is on by default.

The precision is the issue. GPS coordinates in a photo are typically accurate to a few metres — enough to identify a specific building, not a general area. A photo taken at home, shared publicly, publishes your address to anyone who looks.

How the coordinates are stored

EXIF stores position awkwardly, as degrees, minutes and seconds in three rational number pairs, with the hemisphere in a separate reference tag. Latitude 44.4971 is written as 44 degrees, 29 minutes, 49.56 seconds, plus a tag saying "N".

That split matters when you are checking a file: a tool that reads the numbers but not the reference tags can report a southern-hemisphere location as northern. Video is different again — MP4 and MOV store a single ISO 6709 string like "+44.4949+11.3426/".

Check before you share

Open the analyze tool and drop in the file. If a location is present you will see a prominent warning and the exact coordinates, read on your own device.

The coordinates are shown as text and can be copied, but they are deliberately not plotted on a map. Rendering a map would send the location of your photo to a tile provider — precisely the disclosure the tool exists to prevent.

Removing it

Any clean removes GPS, because the GPS directory sits inside the EXIF block. The before-and-after report states explicitly whether location was present and whether it is gone, verified by re-reading the finished file.

If you want to keep the camera settings but drop the location, use the editor instead and delete the latitude and longitude fields individually.

Where location hides besides EXIF

Coordinates can appear in more than one block of the same file, and removing only the EXIF GPS directory can leave the others behind.

• XMP, written by editing software, has its own exif:GPSLatitude and exif:GPSLongitude properties that mirror the EXIF values.
• IPTC records place names rather than coordinates — City, Sub-location, Province/State and Country — which identify a location just as effectively for somewhere distinctive.
• Videos store an ISO 6709 string in the QuickTime udta box, and iPhones additionally write one into the Apple keys/ilst metadata store.
• Some cameras and drones add vendor-specific blocks containing their own positional data.

Stopping it at the source

Cleaning existing files is worth doing, but turning the tagging off means you stop creating the problem.

On iOS: Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera, and choose Never. On Android the path varies by manufacturer, but it is generally Settings, Location, App permissions, Camera — or a "Location tags" switch inside the camera app itself.

Photos already in your library keep the coordinates they were taken with, so the change applies only from that point on. Both platforms also offer a share option that removes location for a single share, which is useful but easy to forget.

What this does not cover

A cleaned file carries no coordinates, but the picture itself may still identify a place — a street sign, a view from a window, a recognisable building.

Uploading also tells the receiving platform your IP address and account regardless of what the file contains. Metadata removal addresses the file, not the act of sharing it.

Questions