Photos taken at home: what they give away when you post them.
A photo of your living room, your new kitten or a room you are renting out can carry the exact position of your front door. Here is how to stop that, and what to check in the picture itself.
The address in the file
If the camera had location permission, the photo's GPS fields hold where it was taken. Taken at home, that is your address. Security vendor Avira puts it simply: "If you share shots of your home, place of work, or other sensitive places, geotags can reveal these locations," and advises leaving geotagging off at home.
Some sites remove it from the copy other people see; few promise to. What Facebook Marketplace and eBay do with photo metadata has what their policies say. A photo sent as a file, by email or in a chat app that keeps the original, arrives with everything in it.
Stop recording it
On iPhone: Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera > Never. On Android, the switch is in the camera app's settings, named Save location on a Pixel and Location tags on a Samsung. Remove the location from a photo has the steps and the sources for each, and how to share one iPhone photo without its location.
This only affects new photos. The ones already in your library keep their position.
What metadata cannot hide
Removing the GPS does nothing about what is in the frame: a house number, a street sign through the window, a parcel label, a school uniform, a view that neighbours would recognise. Look at the picture the way a stranger would before you post it.
Or clean it here
For photos already taken, FileSanity's photo cleaner shows the position in plain words, with the date and the phone, removes them and downloads a clean copy of a JPEG, PNG or iPhone HEIC. The picture is not re-encoded, and the photo never leaves your browser. The browser extension does the same automatically whenever you upload a photo to any site.
Checked
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