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Remove GPS location from a photo

Up to 100 files at once. Mixed formats are fine.

Removing GPS data deletes the coordinates a camera wrote into a photograph and leaves everything else alone — the exposure, the lens and the date survive. The numbers are overwritten rather than hidden, which matters: emptying the directory satisfies every viewer and leaves the location sitting in the file. Drop a photo above; it never leaves your device.

  • Where it runsIn your browser. A file you are stripping for privacy is never uploaded.
  • What is removedCamera, location, author, software and timestamps written into the JPG.
  • What staysThe content itself, untouched and at the same quality — this is not a re-encode.

Remove GPS location from a photo

The coordinates are more precise than people assume

A geotagged photograph does not record a neighbourhood. It records a latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds, which places the camera within a few metres — close enough to identify which house, which room of a garden, which parking space. Many phones also record the altitude and the compass direction the camera was pointing.

The everyday consequence is a marketplace listing. Somebody photographs a bicycle in their driveway, uploads it to a site that does not strip metadata, and has published their home address alongside a picture of something worth stealing. The same applies to photographs of children, of pets, and of anything taken at home.

Hiding the numbers is not removing them

The GPS data lives in its own directory inside the EXIF block. The quick way to remove it is to set that directory's entry count to zero: every photo viewer then reports no location, and the job looks done.

It is not done. The coordinates are still in the file, byte for byte, orphaned but perfectly readable to anything that scans the bytes rather than following the structure. So this overwrites the values first and empties the directory afterwards. The test that proves it looks for the raw numbers in the output and requires them gone.

Why keep the rest

Because for a photographer the rest is useful and harmless. The aperture and shutter speed are how you learn from a shot. The date is how the picture sorts in a library. The lens model is how you remember what you used. None of it says where anybody was.

If you would rather remove everything — for a photograph going to a stranger, or one taken with a camera whose serial number you would rather not publish — the first setting does that instead, and the EXIF page explains what else is in there.

Where the coordinates survive, and where they never existed

A photograph taken on a phone with location services on carries GPS from the moment it is written. It keeps it through a copy, through a move between drives, through email as an attachment and through most cloud storage, because none of those read the file's contents.

A screenshot has none, because there was no camera. Neither does an image saved from a web page, since whatever stripped it upstream stripped it for everyone. If you are unsure which you are holding, that is the case this page settles in a second — running it on a file with no location data does no harm and confirms the answer.

The platforms that strip it, and the ones that pass it on

The large social networks remove EXIF on upload, mostly to save bytes rather than out of concern for you, and the major messaging apps re-encode photographs into something smaller that carries none of it. Sending a picture that way is reasonably safe by accident.

Sending the file itself is not. Email attachments, chat apps set to send the original, file-sharing links, marketplace listings on smaller sites and any upload that keeps your filename generally keep everything else too. The distinction is whether the platform re-encoded your picture or merely stored it, and from the outside those look identical.

Confirming it worked, without trusting this page

On Windows, right-click the file, open Properties and look at the Details tab. On macOS, open it in Preview and show the inspector. Both list the coordinates when they are present and show nothing where they are not, and neither has any reason to flatter this tool.

It is worth doing once on a photograph you know is geotagged, so you have seen the before and the after rather than a claim about them. That is the same standard the rest of this site holds itself to, and it applies to the page you are reading.

How to remove GPS data from a photo

  1. Drop your photo onto this page, or click to choose one.
  2. The coordinates are shown as a place, so you can see what is about to go.
  3. Remove them. Everything else in the photograph stays exactly as it was.

Removing location data: common questions

Is the location really gone, or just hidden?

Gone. The values are overwritten with zeros before the directory is emptied, so the coordinates are not recoverable from the file — not by a viewer, and not by anything reading the raw bytes. This is the difference worth checking in any tool you use: the fast implementation hides them and leaves them there.

Is the photo uploaded?

No — and this is the page where that matters most. Sending a photograph to a server so that it can remove the record of where you were means the server now has both the picture and the location. Everything here happens in your browser.

Will the picture change?

Not by a single pixel. Only the location bytes inside the metadata block are overwritten; the compressed image data is not touched at all, and the file comes out the same length it went in.

How do I stop this happening in the first place?

Turn off location access for the camera app. On iPhone that is Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never; on Android it is a toggle inside the camera app's own settings, usually called "location tags". That prevents new photographs from being tagged and does nothing to the ones you already have — which is what this page is for.

Do screenshots have location data?

No. A screenshot is made by the operating system rather than a camera and has no GPS to record. It can still carry the device model and a timestamp, which the "remove everything" setting takes care of.

Sometimes the better answer is a different format — especially for a photograph stored as JPG.