How to check if a photo has my location in it
Drop the photo below. Any GPS coordinates in the file are listed first, to four decimal places — about eleven metres. If nothing is listed under Location, the file has none. The photo is read in this tab and is never uploaded.
Nothing is uploaded. The inspector runs in a frame that the browser blocks from opening any network connection at all.
Reading the result
Coordinates appear at the top because they are the field most people came to look for. Three things are worth understanding about what you see:
| If it says | It means |
|---|---|
| Nothing under Location | The file has no coordinates. Not hidden, not truncated — absent. |
| Coordinates to four decimals | Roughly eleven metres. One building, not one street. |
| Altitude as well | Height, which in a block of flats suggests a floor. |
| A direction | The compass bearing the camera was pointing when it fired. |
| Thumbnail carries location | The small embedded copy has coordinates of its own. Some strippers miss it entirely. |
There is no map on this page on purpose. Loading map tiles for a set of coordinates tells the tile server where the photo was taken, which would undo the point of checking privately. The coordinates are shown as text with a button that opens OpenStreetMap in a new tab if you want it — nothing is sent unless you click it.
Checking without a tool, and what each method hides
| Where | Shows | Misses |
|---|---|---|
| macOS Preview, Command-I | GPS and EXIF tabs, if the file has them | Nothing much — but it cannot remove any of it |
| Windows: Properties → Details | A curated subset including latitude and longitude | XMP, IPTC, and the thumbnail's own directory |
| iOS Photos, swipe up on a photo | A map, when the library has a place for it | Whether the coordinates are in the file or only in the library |
| An upload-based online checker | Much the same as this page | The point — you have handed the photo you were worried about to a stranger |
Do not paste a sensitive photo into an AI chatbot to ask what metadata it has.That uploads the photo to a third party, which is the thing you were checking in order to avoid. A viewer that runs in your own browser answers the same question with the file staying on your machine.
Check the copy that is actually leaving
The file in your library and the file you send are often not the same bytes. Share sheets, exports, resizing and messaging apps all rewrite images, and the output can carry more or less than the input did.
If it matters, do the round trip: send the photo to yourself the way you were going to send it to someone else, save what arrives, and drop that into the tool above. It takes about twenty seconds and it is the only version of this check that tests what you are actually doing.
What else to look at while you are here
Location is the field people ask about; it is not the only one that identifies you. Worth a glance at the same time:
- The camera body serial number — a number identifying one physical camera, written into every photo it takes. It links photos across accounts and years, and there is no setting to turn it off.
- The capture date and time, often to the second, sometimes with a time-zone offset that indicates roughly where in the world you were.
- The editing software and version, which is one more detail to correlate.
The full viewer lists everything a file contains. If you have seen enough and want it gone,remove the location instead.
Questions
- How do I check if a photo has my location in it?
- Drop it into the tool on this page. If the file contains GPS coordinates they are listed first, to four decimal places — about eleven metres. If nothing appears under Location, the file has no coordinates in it. The photo is read inside your browser and is not uploaded anywhere.
- Can I check a photo for location without uploading it?
- Yes, and you should. The tool here runs in a frame served with the header Content-Security-Policy: connect-src 'none', which makes the browser refuse every outbound network request that frame could make. Open your developer tools, watch the Network tab, and drop a photo in: nothing is sent.
- Why does my phone show a location for a photo that has no GPS data?
- Photo libraries store information about your photos in their own database as well as in the files. A library can show a place for a photo whose file carries no coordinates, and it can show nothing for a file that does. The file is what travels when you share it, so the file is what to check.
- Should I check the original photo or the copy I am about to send?
- The copy you are about to send. Exporting, sharing, resizing and messaging apps all rewrite the file, and what comes out can differ from what went in — sometimes with less metadata, sometimes with more. Send the photo to yourself, then check what actually arrived.
When the browser is the wrong tool
Checking one photo is a browser job. Working out which of four hundred in a folder carry coordinates is not.
Nothing Personal for Mac does two things this page cannot. It reads the download history macOS attaches to a file — where you saved it from — which lives outside the image and is invisible to any browser. And it handles folders rather than a handful of files, from Finder, without opening anything.