Remove the location from a photo before you send it.

A photo's position is stored in its EXIF data as GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude, often with GPSAltitude and the direction the camera faced. It is written when the camera app has permission to use your location. Anyone who receives the file itself, not a re-encoded copy, can read it with free tools.

There are three separate jobs, and it helps to know which one you need: stop new photos recording a location, share one photo without it, or remove it from a file you already have. The first two are settings on the phone. The third needs the file cleaned.

Apple's guide says that sharing a photo also shares its metadata, such as the date and time, location, device and captions. To leave the location out of one share, from Apple's personal safety guide:

1. Open Photos and select the photos you want to send.
2. Tap the Share button, then tap Options at the top of the share sheet.
3. Turn off Location.
4. Share as usual.

The switch applies to that share only, and it removes the location, not the date or the camera model. The same Options screen sets the format: Apple's sharing guide says Most Compatible may convert the file to JPEG.

To remove the location from a photo in your library, Apple's guide says: open the photo in Photos, tap the More button, tap Adjust Info, tap Adjust Location, then tap No Location.

To stop the camera recording it at all: Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera, then tap Never. This only affects photos you take from now on. Photos already taken keep their position.

On a Mac, in Photos, select the photos and choose Image > Location > Hide Location.

Each maker's camera app puts the switch in a different place. On a Pixel, from Google's Pixel Camera help: open Camera, tap Settings at the bottom left, then More settings, and turn off Save location.

On a Samsung Galaxy, from Samsung's support page: open Camera, tap the Settings gear, and set Location tags off.

For photos already taken, Google Photos has a limit worth knowing. Its help page says that if a location was added automatically by your camera, you cannot update or remove it in Google Photos; only estimated and manually added locations can be removed. Google Photos does let you turn off Share photo locations for a shared album or conversation, but a photo sent as a file, attached to an email or uploaded somewhere else still carries what the camera wrote.

If the camera's location was off when you took the photo, there is no position in the file to remove. If you share from the iPhone share sheet with Location off, the copy that leaves your phone has none either. In both cases you are done with the location.

What the settings do not touch is everything else: the date and time, the phone's make and model, the software version, and on edited photos sometimes a name. If those matter for this recipient, or the photo came from someone else's phone, clean the file itself. What a photo carries lists the fields.

On a computer, the command-line tool exiftool removes the GPS group from a JPEG while leaving the rest:

exiftool -gps:all= photo.jpg

It keeps a copy of the original next to it, named photo.jpg_original; delete that before you send anything from the folder. To remove more than the location, see the exiftool FAQ on deleting all metadata while keeping the colour profile.

FileSanity's photo cleaner reads a JPEG, PNG or iPhone HEIC in your browser tab, lists the position in plain words beside the time, the device and any names, removes them and downloads the clean copy. The picture is not re-encoded and the file is not uploaded; here is how to check that.

Clean a file

Menu paths checked on 9 October 2026 against the pages linked above. Menus move between versions; when yours differs, the vendor's page is the authority. Found a mistake? Tell us.

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