How to remove location from a photo before posting it
Drop the photo below and download the clean copy — the GPS coordinates are deleted, the image is not re-compressed, and the file is never uploaded. To stop it happening again, turn off location access for your camera app.
Nothing is uploaded. The inspector runs in a frame that the browser blocks from opening any network connection at all.
Three ways, in the order worth trying them
| Approach | Removes | Leaves |
|---|---|---|
| The tool on this page | Coordinates and every other identifying field | Colour profile and orientation only |
| iOS share sheet → Options → Location off | Coordinates | Camera, lens, exact capture time, iOS version |
| Camera location access turned off | Coordinates, on all future photos | Everything else, and every photo already taken |
They are not alternatives so much as different scopes. Turning off camera location access is the durable fix and does nothing for the photo already on your screen. The tool fixes the photo in front of you and has to be remembered every time.
Stopping it at the source
- iPhone and iPad — Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never. This breaks Places, Memories and map views in Photos, which is a real cost if you use them. More at iPhone photos.
- Android — in the camera app's own settings, look for a location, GPS or geotagging switch, and turn it off. The exact wording varies by manufacturer.
- A dedicated camera — most do not have GPS at all. The ones that do have it in the setup menu, and some record it via a paired phone app instead, which needs turning off separately.
In every case this changes what future photos record. Photos already in your library keep the coordinates they were taken with.
Do not delegate this to the platform
"It gets stripped on upload" is a hope, not a setting. Many platforms do remove metadata, but which ones and how much is genuinely unsettled: the answers online are largely undated, copied between articles, and often describe a version of the site that no longer exists. The web upload path and the mobile app frequently behave differently, and nobody documents that.
We are testing it properly rather than repeating it — seethe methodology. Until dated results are published here, this site makes no claim about any specific platform.
And it only ever applies to the copy you uploaded. The same photo attached to an email, AirDropped, sent in a chat or put in a marketplace listing takes a different route with different handling.
A location-only fix leaves a lot behind
Worth knowing if you use the iOS share-sheet toggle, which is otherwise an excellent option. It is a location toggle, not a metadata toggle. What typically survives it:
- The camera or phone make and model, and the lens
- The exact capture date and time, often to the second
- The exposure settings and the OS version that produced the file
- On a dedicated camera, the body serial number — which identifies one physical camera
For most sharing that is fine. For posting somewhere you would rather not be tied to a particular device at a particular minute, it is not the same as clean. Share a photo to yourself with Location off and drop the result into the tool above to see what came through.
Then check it
Whatever you used — this tool included — drop the cleaned file back in and read the result. Verifying a stripper takes ten seconds and occasionally changes which stripper you use. If anything identifying survived, this tool says so and does not offer the download rather than reporting a file clean when it is not.
More on reading the result: checking a photo for location.
Questions
- How do I remove the location from a photo before posting it?
- Drop it into the tool on this page and download the clean copy — the coordinates are deleted along with the rest of the metadata, the image is not re-compressed, and nothing is uploaded. On an iPhone you can instead tap Share, then Options, and turn Location off, which removes the coordinates but leaves the camera model, capture time and iOS version in place.
- Does removing location from a photo reduce its quality?
- Not here. For JPEG, PNG and WebP the metadata is deleted from the file container and the compressed image data is copied across byte for byte, so the picture is never decoded and never re-compressed. The pixels in the clean copy are identical to the pixels in the original.
- Is it enough to rely on the platform stripping location on upload?
- It is not a plan. Many platforms do strip metadata, but the published answers about which and how much are mostly undated, platforms change processing without announcing it, and the web upload path often differs from the app. It also only covers the copy you uploaded — the same file emailed or sent in a chat takes a different route.
- Does removing location also remove the other metadata?
- With this tool, yes — the camera make and model, body serial number, capture date, editing software, credit fields and keywords all go with it. The colour profile and the orientation flag are kept, because they describe how to display the image and say nothing about you.
When the browser is the wrong tool
Doing this to every photo before every post is the kind of habit that lasts a fortnight. Cleaning a folder from a Finder right-click is the kind that lasts.
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.