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How to remove location data from photos before you share them

A photo from a phone can carry the exact place it was taken. Here is where that data lives, how to keep it out, and how to remove it from a file you already have.

Reviewed by Victor Yuki Matusita on . First published . First version, with the measurements of November 2, 2026.

Phones write facts about each photo into the file itself: the camera, the date and time, and, when location is on, the GPS coordinates of where you stood. Apple puts it plainly: the coordinates are embedded into each photo and video. Anyone who gets the original file can read them, and a few clicks put them on a map.

Some apps strip this data when you post, and some do not. Email, file transfers, cloud folders and many chat apps send the file as it is. If a photo shows your home, your child’s school or anywhere you would rather not pin, remove the location before the file leaves your hands.

Strip the metadata from your photos here

This is Resize image, set to By percentage, 100: each photo keeps every pixel and comes back without its location, camera and date. It runs in this browser tab, so the photos are never uploaded.

Drop images here

or paste with Ctrl V · JPG, PNG or WebPJPG, PNG or WebP, as many as you like

Resize
%

Open the Resize image tool

What our photos carried

All three of our real phone photos in JPG had GPS coordinates, three named the camera model and three had the date and time they were taken. They are old test photos from a Google Pixel and from iPhones, and the data was all still there.

Of our 10 HEIC test photos, 3 had real GPS coordinates and all 10 named the camera. HEIC is the format an iPhone uses by default, and it carries the same kind of data as a JPG.

Stop the camera from saving it

The surest way is to never record it. On an iPhone, Apple’s steps are: go to Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Location Services, then Camera, and tap Never. Apple notes that location data can be collected only if the Camera app has access to Location Services.

On Android it depends on the phone. Google’s help says you can control whether your camera adds location to your photos, and that the setting varies by manufacturer. In the Pixel Camera app, Google’s steps are to open the camera settings and turn off Save location.

Share without it from your phone

On an iPhone you can leave the location out each time you share. Apple’s steps: select the photos, tap the share button, tap Options, and turn off Location. The share sheet then shows Location Not Included above the Options button. For a photo already in your library, tap Adjust Info, then Adjust Location, then No Location.

Google Photos keeps locations private by default, according to its help center. It can remove a location it estimated, but if the camera added the location, Google says you cannot update or remove it in Google Photos. For those files, strip the data from the file itself.

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Strip it from the file without changing the photo

Any tool on this site that writes an image writes it from the pixels, which leaves the metadata behind. Most of them also change the picture: they compress it, crop it, turn it or change its format. So we measured which one changes the photo least, by a rule fixed before the measurement: the same frame, the same format, and the pixels closest to the original.

Resize image at By percentage, 100 won. A photo that already has the size you ask for is not decoded or encoded again: the tool copies the picture data as it is and leaves the metadata out. Our photos came back with identical pixels, three of them, and only 1% lighter, the weight of the metadata.

What the other tools did

Compress image also removed the location and made the photos 73% lighter, but by recompressing them: its lowest score on our photos was 35.7 dB of PSNR, a measure of how close two images are, where higher is closer. Good for sending, not for keeping. Crop image and Rotate image change the frame by design, and PNG to JPG turned the photos into PNG files 5.2 times the size in Chromium and 4.0 times in WebKit.

None of them left GPS coordinates, camera names or dates in the photos, and the PDF from Image to PDF carried no GPS either. The table under "What we measured" has each tool.

What stays, and what a photo still shows

Two things stay on purpose. A photo stored upside down keeps a tiny tag that says which way is up, so it does not show turned: one of our photos kept one. The color profile stays too, so the colors do not shift.

Removing the data does not hide what is in the picture. Google’s help warns that people may still work out where a photo was taken from what it shows, such as a landmark. Look at the photo itself before you share it.

For HEIC photos

Resize image takes JPG, PNG and WebP. For HEIC photos from an iPhone, use HEIC to JPG instead: it writes each JPG from the pixels too, and none of our HEIC test photos kept any GPS data after the conversion. Our HEIC to JPG guide has those measurements.

What we measured

Our three real phone photos through each image tool that takes a JPG, each with the option that changes the photo least. The share is the size after against the originals, and pixels compares each copy with the original on the worst of the photos.

Each image tool that takes a JPG: the size after, the format, whether the frame stays the same, how close the pixels are on the worst photo, and how many photos kept GPS data
ToolSize afterFormatSame framePixels, worst photoPhotos with GPS left
Compress image2.5 MB (27%)JPGYes35.7 dBNone
Resize image9.2 MB (99%)JPGYesSame pixelsNone
Crop image5.9 MB (63%)JPGNoNot comparableNone
Rotate image7.3 MB (78%)JPGNoNot comparableNone
PNG to JPG48.7 MB (523%)PNGYesSame pixelsNone
Image to PDF7.4 MB (80%)PDFNoNot comparableNone

Measured on November 2, 2026 through the tool pages of this site in Chromium 156 and in WebKit 27.2 on Windows. The two browsers wrote files of the same size with five of the six tools; with PNG to JPG, the sizes differed. The metadata and the pixels were read in Node, with the same decoder for the original and the copy. The table shows Chromium.

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