How to remove location and hidden data from photos before sharing
Short answer: Phone photos usually carry EXIF metadata: the exact GPS location, the date and time, and the camera and phone model. Big social networks strip it when they publish a photo, but email, cloud links, messaging apps sending files and many websites pass it on intact. Remove it before sharing, or turn off location tagging in your camera settings.
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What a photo quietly records
Every photo a phone or camera takes carries a block of information alongside the picture, called EXIF metadata. Depending on the device and its settings, it can include:
- GPS coordinates, often accurate to a few metres — enough to identify a house.
- The date and time the photo was taken, to the second.
- The camera or phone make and model, and sometimes a serial number.
- Lens, exposure and flash settings.
- The software that last edited the image, and sometimes an author or copyright name.
None of it is visible when you look at the photo, which is exactly why it gets shared by accident.
When it is shared, and when it is not
The large social networks generally strip location data from the photos they publish, so a picture posted publicly on those platforms does not usually expose its GPS coordinates to other users. The risk is everywhere else — and there is a lot of everywhere else:
- Photos attached to an email.
- Files shared through cloud storage links.
- Photos sent as a document or file in messaging apps, rather than as a compressed photo.
- Images uploaded to forums, marketplaces, blogs and smaller websites.
- Photos of items for sale, taken at home.
A photo of something you are selling, taken in your living room and posted to a listing site that keeps metadata, can hand a stranger your address. That is the scenario worth guarding against.
How to remove metadata from a photo
- Open Remove Image Metadata.
- Add the photos — JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, TIFF and BMP all work, in a batch if you like.
- Leave the colour profile setting alone unless you have a reason to remove it.
- Download the cleaned images, individually or as a ZIP.
The picture itself is not touched. For JPG, PNG and WebP the compressed image data is copied across byte for byte, so the result is pixel-identical to what you uploaded — only the hidden information is gone. The one exception is a photo whose EXIF tells viewers to rotate it on display: that photo is saved again the right way up, because removing the instruction would otherwise leave it sideways.
The colour profile is kept by default because it contains nothing personal and removing it can make photos look flat or washed out.
How to check it worked
It is worth checking, especially the first time. On a Mac, open the image in Preview and choose Tools → Show Inspector; the GPS tab disappears when there is no location. On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties, then Details. For a complete list of every field, the free exiftool command-line program shows everything a file still holds.
Stop recording location in the first place
On an iPhone, go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera and choose Never. You can also remove location for a single share: after choosing a photo to share, tap Options at the top and turn off Location.
On Android, open the Camera app's settings and turn off the option to save location (it may be called location tags or store location, depending on the phone).
Photos converted or compressed on ConvertNicely have metadata removed by default too — so HEIC to JPG or compressing an image also cleans it.