A photograph taken at home carries your home address, written into the file as coordinates accurate to a few metres. Send the original to someone and they can read it. Most people have no idea this is happening, because nothing on screen ever mentions it.
This guide covers how to remove that position before sharing, which apps already do it for you, and — importantly — how to check your work rather than assuming it worked.
Removing location is permanent for that copy. Keep your original if the position has any value to you: it is what lets you sort a trip by place later, or remember where an old photograph was taken. Strip the copy you send, not the one you keep.
Many photos have no location at all, and stripping a file that was never geotagged achieves nothing except a false sense of having done something.
Open the photo in a metadata reader first. Photo Trace shows whether coordinates are present, reading the file in your browser without uploading it. If the Where panel is empty, there is nothing to remove.
iOS has this built into the share sheet, though it is easy to miss:
The setting is remembered for the current share only, so it needs doing each time. To stop location being recorded in the first place, go to Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services › Camera and choose Never.
Android varies by manufacturer, so there are several routes:
Through the gallery. Open the photo, swipe up or tap the information icon to show details, and look for a location entry. Many galleries, including Google Photos, allow removing it from there.
Through the camera settings. Open your camera app’s settings and turn off the location or geotagging option. New photos are taken without a position; existing ones keep theirs.
By letting the system do it. This one is counter-intuitive but reliable: Android’s photo picker already strips coordinates from images handed to apps and websites. If you share a photo by selecting it through that picker, the copy that arrives generally has no location. It is the same mechanism that frustrates people trying to read their own photo locations in Chrome, which we cover in why location is missing in Chrome on Android.
Windows. Right-click the file, choose Properties, open the Details tab, and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. You can strip selected fields or create a clean copy.
macOS. Preview can remove location through its inspector. For batches, the exiftool command-line utility is the standard tool.
Any platform. Re-saving a photo through an image editor usually discards metadata, since most editors write a fresh file rather than copying the original fields across. This works but is blunt: it also removes the date, the camera settings and often some image quality.
Several platforms remove location for you on upload, which means the effort is sometimes unnecessary:
| Service | What happens |
|---|---|
| WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram | Re-compress the image and discard all metadata, location included. |
| Most large social networks | Generally strip location on upload, though behaviour changes over time and is rarely documented. |
| Email attachments | Usually send the file untouched. Metadata survives. |
| Cloud sharing links | Share the original file. Metadata survives. |
| Direct file transfer | AirDrop, Bluetooth, USB and similar copy the file exactly. Metadata survives. |
The pattern worth remembering: services that re-compress your image strip metadata; services that transfer the file intact preserve it. Email and cloud links fall into the second group, which surprises people.
This is the step most guides leave out, and it is the one that matters. App behaviour changes between versions, settings reset, and a toggle you flipped last month may not have stuck.
Send the photo to yourself first, then open that received copy in a metadata reader and confirm the Where panel is empty. Checking the original on your phone tells you nothing about what the recipient will get.
Share the photo to yourself by the exact route you plan to use — same app, same settings. Open the copy you receive in Photo Trace. If no location appears, that route is safe for that app version.
Location gets the attention, but a photo carries more than coordinates. The capture date and time, the camera make and model, and the exposure settings are all recorded. In combination these can identify which device took a set of photographs, even without a position attached.
Whether that matters depends on what you are protecting. For most people it does not. For journalists, activists and anyone sharing images under a pseudonym, device identification can be as revealing as a location, and stripping everything is the safer choice.
Our guide on whether sharing photos online exposes your location covers the wider picture.
Turning geotagging off entirely is the simplest protection, but you lose something real: the ability to reconstruct where you have been, which becomes more valuable the further back your photo library goes.
A reasonable middle path is to keep location recording on, keep your originals private, and strip coordinates from the copies you publish. You keep the record for yourself without broadcasting it.
Photo Trace shows the location, date and camera details stored in any photo, entirely inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is stored.