How to remove location from photos and stop geotagging

How to remove location from photos comes down to two fixes: stop the camera from writing GPS coordinates, and delete them from the files you already have. On an iPhone that means Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera > Never for new shots, and Share > Options > Location off for copies you send. On a computer, exiftool -gps:all= -xmp:gps*= photo.jpg removes the coordinates from both places they can live. Place names typed into IPTC or XMP fields are a separate problem, covered below.

Turn off geotagging at the source

Settings only affect new photos. Nothing here rewrites your existing library.

iPhone

Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera and choose Never. Apple's own wording is blunt: location metadata can be collected only if the Camera app has access to Location Services. New photos then carry no coordinates.

Android

The switch lives in the camera app, and every vendor names it differently. Google's help center keeps a list; the common ones:

If you can't find it, revoke the permission instead: Settings > Apps > Camera > Permissions > Location > Don't allow. The exact path varies with the Android skin, but the effect is the same.

How to remove location from photos you already took

iPhone and Mac Photos

To clean a photo in your library, open it, tap the More button (three dots), then Adjust Info > Adjust Location > No Location. On a Mac, select the photos in Photos and choose Image > Location > Hide Location.

To clean only the copy you send, tap Share, then Options, and turn off Location. The sheet shows Location Not Included above the Options button. Leave All Photos Data off; it sends the original with all of its metadata.

Android and Google Photos

Google Photos is less useful than it looks. Its help page states that you can only edit or remove estimated or manually added locations. If the camera wrote the location, Google Photos can't remove it, and a photo you download or email still carries the original coordinates. The Share photo locations toggle on shared albums controls what album members see in Google Photos; it doesn't clean your files.

Samsung Gallery does edit the file: open the photo, More options (three dots) > Details > Edit, tap the red minus next to the location, Save. On One UI 3 and later, the share screen also has a Remove location data option.

Windows

Right-click the file, Properties > Details, then Remove Properties and Personal Information at the bottom. Choose Remove the following properties from this file and tick the GPS entries. Windows works on its own list of properties rather than raw tags, so check the result with ExifTool or a reader before trusting it.

macOS Preview

Open the photo, Tools > Show Inspector, More Info tab, GPS sub-tab, Remove Location Info, then save. It removes the EXIF GPS block. I wouldn't assume it also clears an XMP copy of the coordinates or the IPTC city fields; check.

ExifTool: what each command actually removes

The usual one-liner is incomplete. Coordinates can sit in two places: the EXIF GPS IFD, which the camera writes, and XMP (XMP-exif:GPSLatitude and related tags), which some editing and cataloging software adds. I built a test JPEG with both, plus IPTC and XMP place names, and ran each command on a fresh copy.

The common answer, -gps:all=, only empties the EXIF GPS IFD:

$ exiftool -gps:all= photo.jpg
    1 image files updated
$ exiftool -G1 -s -XMP-exif:GPSLatitude -XMP-exif:GPSLongitude -GPSPosition photo.jpg
[XMP-exif]      GPSLatitude                     : 36 deg 59' 53.17" N
[XMP-exif]      GPSLongitude                    : 110 deg 5' 54.72" W
[Composite]     GPSPosition                     : 36 deg 59' 53.17" N, 110 deg 5' 54.72" W

The coordinates are still there, and any app that reads XMP will put the photo on a map. -geotag= is no better as a cleanup tool; it targets what geotagging writes and leaves a few tags behind:

$ exiftool -geotag= photo.jpg
    1 image files updated
$ exiftool -G1 -a -s -gps:all -xmp-exif:all photo.jpg
[GPS]           GPSVersionID                    : 2.3.0.0
[GPS]           GPSDestBearingRef               : True North
[GPS]           GPSDestBearing                  : 87.31
[GPS]           GPSHPositioningError            : 4.7 m

Location is an ExifTool family 2 group. It covers GPS coordinates in EXIF and XMP and the IPTC and XMP place fields, but not GPSDateStamp and GPSTimeStamp, which belong to the Time group. Combine it with -gps:all= and nothing is left:

$ exiftool -gps:all= -location:all= photo.jpg
    1 image files updated
$ exiftool -a -G1 -s -gps:all -location:all photo.jpg
$

That's the command I'd use. Add -overwrite_original to skip the _original backup, and -r DIR to process a folder.

Location is not only GPS

Photographers, agencies and some apps fill in place names, and these survive any GPS-only cleanup:

IPTC Extension adds LocationCreated and LocationShown structures in XMP; -location:all= removed those too in testing. GPSImgDirection is worth a mention as well: it records which way the lens pointed, which narrows a position down fast when combined with a city name.

Then there's the picture itself. A street sign, a house number, the view from your window or a reflection in a car door can give a location away with no metadata at all. Google's help page says as much: people can guess the location from landmarks even when the location data is hidden. The guide to finding where a photo was taken shows how little it takes.

Overwrite coordinates instead of deleting them

Sometimes you want the photo on a map, just not on your doorstep. The EXIF editor accepts JPEG and TIFF and has an EXIF GEO Tags section where you can type a coarser latitude and longitude, such as 37.00 and 110.10 with the North and West references. Two decimal places is roughly a kilometer of latitude, which is city level. See the glossary entry on GPS coordinates for how the values are stored.

Two caveats from testing. The editor writes EXIF GPS only, so if the file also carries XMP GPS, the precise copy stays there. And the neighbors of latitude and longitude (GPSImgDirection, GPSHPositioningError) keep their old values unless you change them too. If you'd rather drop everything, the metadata remover strips the whole file, location included.

Confirm the GPS is gone

With ExifTool, the check is the same command as above without the =: exiftool -a -G1 -s -gps:all -location:all photo.jpg should print nothing. For a whole folder, list the files that still have coordinates:

$ exiftool -r -if '$GPSLatitude' -p '$Directory/$FileName' scan
    2 directories scanned
    1 files failed condition
    1 image files read
scan/a.jpg

Each path printed at the end is a file that still has coordinates.

Without a terminal, drop the file into the EXIF reader. If it lists no GPS fields, the EXIF GPS IFD is gone. It doesn't display XMP GPS or the IPTC place fields, though, so a clean result there settles the EXIF side only.

On a phone, open the cleaned copy on the receiving side: the map and place name should be gone from its info panel. Uploading to a website and checking there proves nothing about the file, since many sites strip GPS themselves (see does social media remove metadata).