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Geotager

How to remove the GPS location from a photo

Drop the photo on Geotager and press Remove the location. The coordinates are taken out of the file — out of both places they can hide — and the result is read back before you get it. On an iPhone you can also turn Location off in the share sheet’s Options before sending.

Remove it here, in three steps

  1. Drop the photo, or several at once.
  2. Press Remove the location. To clear the date, the camera model and everything else stored in the file as well, press Remove everything instead.
  3. Download. The file arrives named -no-location, so the cleaned copy can never be confused with the original.

Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is kept. The photo is opened by your own browser; disconnect from the network first and it works exactly the same, which is the shortest way to prove it.

Why removing a location is harder than it looks

A photo can store the position twice. Once in the EXIF block, where the camera wrote it, and once in a descriptive text packet called XMP, which editing software adds and which most people never hear about. Tools that clear only the first hand you back a file that looks clean in Windows and still gives up the address to anything that reads the second.

So the removal here purges both, then sweeps the file again. If any trace survives — or if that second packet is compressed, and therefore unreadable to this engine — the removal is declared failed and your original is handed back untouched. That is deliberate, and it is the whole design principle: on a tool like this, a silent failure is the worst possible defect, because it would have you publish a photo believing you had cleaned it.

Removal is the one operation available on every format the tool can open, camera raw files included. Adding a location to a raw file is refused — those are irreplaceable originals — but taking one out of them is not.

On a phone, before you send

iPhone. Pick the photo, tap Share, then tap Options at the top of the share sheet and turn Location off. What you send then carries no coordinates. It is per-share and it resets, so it protects the copy you are sending and not the one in your library — the iPhone guide goes through the rest.

Android. Google Photos has a “remove geo location” setting that applies when you share, but coverage depends on the app you share through, and a file manager sending the original as an attachment will not touch it. Reading the sent file back is the only way to know.

On Windows, and what it leaves behind

Right-click ▸ Properties ▸ Details has a Remove Properties and Personal Information link at the bottom. It works, and it is right there, which is the best thing about it. Two things to know: it offers to write a cleaned copy rather than change the original, which is usually what you want; and it clears the properties Windows itself understands, which is not the same set as everything a photo can carry.

With ExifTool

Remove the location only:

exiftool -gps:all= photo.jpg

Remove everything the file carries:

exiftool -all= photo.jpg

For a video, remember -ee, without which locations stored in timed tracks go unnoticed: 

exiftool -a "-gps*" -ee video.mp4

Prove it is gone

Whatever removed it, this is the check. Anything printed here means something survived:

exiftool -a -G1 -s -gps:all photo-no-location.jpg

An empty answer is the answer you want. Reading it back yourself also protects you from the failure mode no tool can protect you from: cleaning one file and attaching another. Checking a photo’s location covers the other ways to look.

When it is worth doing

A geotagged photo carries a position accurate to a few metres. That is harmless for a landscape and not harmless in three very ordinary situations: a property listing, where photos of the inside of a home publish that home’s address; a photo of a child, taken in a garden or outside a school; and a private sale, where the photo of the item was taken at your home and goes to a stranger.

The usual reassurance — “social networks strip it anyway” — is true more often than not, and it is a side effect of their re-encoding rather than a promise anyone has made. Which apps remove a photo’s location sets out where it stops being true. The safe rule is to clean before sending rather than to count on the recipient’s software.

What removing the location does not do

  • It does not change the picture. A street sign, a house number or a view from a window is still in the image, and no metadata tool touches that.
  • It does not remove the date unless you ask for it — that is what “Remove everything” is for.
  • It does not reach copies already sent. Removal works on the file in front of you, not on the one in somebody else’s inbox.