Before you share a photo, it’s worth knowing what’s riding along inside it. Usually: the camera or phone model, the exact date and time, the settings, and if location services were on, the coordinates of where you were standing.

For a holiday snap, harmless. For a photo taken at home, on a listing you’re selling from, or of a child at their school, it’s an address in a file you’re about to hand to strangers.

Here’s how to take it out.

First: check whether you need to

A lot of privacy advice skips this and leaves people stripping metadata that was already gone.

If you’re posting to a major social platform, it’s already handled. Instagram, Facebook, X, WhatsApp, Discord, TikTok and Reddit all strip EXIF GPS on upload. They do it for their own liability reasons, but the effect is the same: the photo your followers can download does not contain your coordinates.

Where metadata survives intact:

Emailing or messaging a file directly as an attachment
AirDrop, Bluetooth, USB transfer
Cloud storage links (Dropbox, Drive, iCloud shared links)
Forums, wikis, marketplaces and smaller sites that don’t process uploads
Your own website or portfolio, if you upload the original

That second list is where the actual risk lives, and it’s the list most guides never mention.

Removing it

Windows, no software needed

Select the files → right-click → Properties → Details tab → Remove Properties and Personal Information at the bottom. Choose “Create a copy with all possible properties removed” (safest, since it keeps your original) or select specific fields to strip.

Works on multiple files at once. It’s been in Windows for years and almost nobody knows.

macOS, in Preview

Open the photo in Preview → Tools → Show Inspector (⌘I) → the GPS tab → Remove Location Info.

That button strips GPS only and leaves camera and date intact, which is often exactly what you want. To remove everything, export a copy: File → Export, uncheck the metadata options.

iPhone

Select the photo in Photos → tap Share → tap Options at the top of the share sheet → toggle Location off → share.

This is per-share and it resets, so it’s a habit rather than a setting. To stop geotagging at the source instead: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never.

Android

In Google Photos: open the photo → ⓘ Details → Remove location. In the camera app: Settings → Location tags → off.

Exact wording varies by manufacturer; the concepts don’t.

In your browser

Fastest for a one-off across any device. The important criterion: the tool must process the file locally. Uploading a photo to a server to have its location removed means handing your location to that server first. You’ve done the opposite of what you set out to do.

You can verify any tool’s claim in 30 seconds: open DevTools → Network tab → drop a photo in. If the image bytes get POSTed anywhere, it uploaded your photo.

What about the photo itself?

Stripping EXIF removes the recorded location. It does not remove the location that’s visible in the frame: your house number, the street sign, the view from your window, the distinctive skyline. Metadata is one channel; pixels are another.

If a photo would identify a place to anyone who looked at it, removing the coordinates doesn’t fix that.

Removing vs. replacing

You don’t always want nothing. Sometimes you want a different location: a general neighbourhood rather than a precise address, or the correct coordinates on a photo that was tagged wrong.

That’s the same EXIF fields, written rather than deleted. If that’s what you need, you can set a photo’s location in your browser. Click a point on the map, download the file with that location written in. Nothing uploaded.

FAQ

Does removing EXIF reduce image quality? No. Metadata is a separate block from the pixels. Stripping it doesn’t re-encode anything. The file just gets slightly smaller.

Can removed EXIF be recovered? Not from the stripped copy. Keep your original if you want the data back.

Does a screenshot remove metadata? It removes the original’s metadata, yes, since a screenshot is a new file. But it’s a lossy way to do it, and the screenshot gets its own metadata.

Does Discord remove EXIF? Yes, Discord strips EXIF metadata including GPS from uploaded images.

Does resizing or editing remove it? Sometimes, but it depends entirely on the editor. Don’t rely on it as a privacy measure; check the output.

How to Remove EXIF & GPS Data From Photos