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Geotager

Change or remove a photo’s location on iPhone

The Photos app can adjust a picture’s location, and the share sheet can leave it out of a single send. Both act on what leaves the app, not necessarily on the HEIC file sitting in your library. If the file itself has to be right — because you are about to hand it to someone — edit the file and read it back.

See where an iPhone photo was taken

Open the picture in Photos and tap the (i) button, or swipe up on the photo. A map and a place name appear underneath if there is a location. No map means either that the photo carries none, or that Photos is not showing you one — which is not the same thing, and is the whole subject of this page.

Adjust the location in Photos

  1. Open the photo and tap (i).
  2. Tap Adjust next to the map, or Add a Location if there is none.
  3. Search for a place, pick it, and confirm.

Photos will show the new place from then on, and Revert puts the original back — which tells you something useful in itself: the app is keeping both, so what it is editing is its own record of the picture.

This is the part that surprises people. A photo library editing a location is editing a library entry; a file on disk is a different object. Whether your adjustment travels depends on how the photo leaves the phone — AirDrop, Mail, a messaging app and “save to Files” do not all behave the same way, and none of them promises to. The only answer that is not a guess is to send the photo to yourself and read the location out of the file you received.

Leave the location out of one send

This one is exact, and it is the setting most people never find. Select the photo, tap Share, then tap Options at the very top of the share sheet, and turn Location off. Everything you send in that sheet goes without coordinates.

The same panel lets you send All Photos Data or the unmodified original, which is the opposite choice — useful when you actually want the file intact, and worth noticing so you do not pick it by accident.

The toggle applies to that share and resets. It protects the copy you send, never the copy in your library; if what you want is a clean file to keep, remove the location from the file.

Stop the camera recording it at all

Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Location Services ▸ Camera ▸ Never. From then on new photos carry no coordinates. It changes nothing about the thousands already in your library, and it also switches off the “places” map that makes those photos findable — which is why most people would rather clean the photos they share than blind the camera.

HEIC, and editing the file itself on the phone

iPhones save photos as HEIC (and sometimes AVIF), a container that stores the same EXIF block a JPEG does, just arranged differently. There is no need to convert anything to fix a location — converting would re-encode the image and lose quality for no reason.

On the phone: open Geotager in Safari, tap the drop area, and pick the photo from Photos or Files. Type or paste coordinates, or use the map, and download — the file lands in Files with a -geotagged suffix. Adding a location to an iPhone photo appends a new block at the end of the file rather than rewriting it, so no existing byte moves and nothing else in the picture’s information is disturbed.

The site can also be installed to the Home Screen, after which it appears in the iOS share sheet and photos can be sent to it directly. Nothing is uploaded either way: the file is opened by the browser on the phone.

Why a location seems to come back

  • You cleaned the library copy, then exported an original. With iCloud Photos set to optimise storage, what leaves the phone may be fetched fresh from iCloud.
  • You cleaned one file and attached another. The most common cause by a wide margin, and the reason the cleaned file here is named -no-location: two files that look alike in a picker are easy to confuse, two files with different names are not.
  • Something read the second copy. A location can sit in two places in a file, and a tool that clears only the first leaves the other for anything that looks.

All three are settled the same way, by reading the exact file you are about to send rather than the one your phone is showing you.