How to remove EXIF data and GPS location from a photo

On an iPhone, tap Share, then Options, and switch Location off before you send. Apple’s own safety guide says the sheet then shows “Location Not Included” above the Options button, and the copy that leaves your phone has no GPS coordinates. That is the whole job for most people who want to remove location data from a photo, and it costs nothing.

It leaves the rest of the EXIF data in place, though. Whether that matters depends on what your camera wrote. Check first.

Read your photo’s EXIF first

What a photo carries depends on the camera, the app and what happened to the file since. Drop it into our EXIF viewer and it lists every field on your device, starting with the ones that give something away: the coordinates as plain numbers, the date and time zone, the camera and any serial numbers, names, and whether a small preview picture is hidden inside. Nothing is uploaded, and no map is asked about the location.

Two public photos we opened on 24 September 2026 show the range. An iPhone 14 picture carried its GPS position with a stated accuracy of 4.8 metres, 1,734 bytes of Apple maker notes, a hidden preview, and an XMP note that Apple Photos Clean Up had been used on it. A Nikon Z 6 photo carried the camera and lens serial numbers twice, once in EXIF and again in XMP, plus the photographer’s name in three places. The viewer’s “Remove all hidden details” button hands the photo to our EXIF remover, which is free and needs no sign-in.

What a camera writes into EXIF

EXIF is a block of numbered tags stored inside the image file. In a JPEG it sits in an APP1 segment that starts with the letters Exif; PNG has an eXIf chunk and WebP an EXIF chunk. The tags below are the ones that point at a person, a place or a device. Not every camera fills in every one.

AI image tools use EXIF too. Automatic1111 puts its whole prompt and settings, seed included, into the UserComment tag when it saves a JPEG or WebP; the Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI metadata guide shows what that looks like.

Free ways to strip it, and where each one stops

• iPhone and iPad, whole photo. In Photos, open the picture, tap the More button, then Adjust Info, Adjust Location, No Location. The share-sheet toggle above only affects the copy you send.
• Mac. In Photos, select the pictures and choose Image, Location, Hide Location.
• Google Photos shares the location your camera recorded whenever you share through it, unless you turn off “Share photo locations” for that album or conversation. Its help page adds two catches: a location added by your camera can’t be edited or removed inside Google Photos, and partner sharing always includes location details.
• On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties, open the Details tab and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. “Create a copy with all possible properties removed” leaves the original alone. The word “possible” is doing work there: not every file type lets Windows remove every property, so check the copy.
• From a terminal, exiftool -all= photo.jpg removes every tag ExifTool can write. Its documentation warns that this takes the colour space information too, so colours can shift unless you copy those tags back.

For GPS alone, the share toggle is the right tool and nobody should pay for it. How ExifTool compares with a screenshot and with our cleaner, byte for byte, is in the side-by-side comparison.

What our cleaner does with EXIF, and what it costs

Every image you add to WipeTheAI is cleaned on your device first. Nothing is uploaded for that step. In a JPEG the cleaner drops the EXIF block, so GPS, serial numbers, owner name and dates go together; there is no picking and choosing, apart from one tag it keeps on purpose (more on that below). XMP, IPTC, comments and C2PA Content Credentials go in the same pass. It keeps the JFIF header, the ICC colour profile in APP2 and the Adobe colour flags in APP14, and copies every byte from the start of the image data to the end of the file unchanged. PNG loses its eXIf and text chunks and keeps its colour chunks. WebP loses its EXIF and XMP chunks, with their flags cleared in the header.

The scan panel names what was in the file before anything is removed: maker, model, software, date, and whether a GPS block is present. It says the GPS block exists without printing the coordinates on screen.

Now the costs. First, the file the Wipe tool gives you is not that lossless copy. Both wipe modes change the pixels after the clean. “Keep it looking the same” scales the picture to 60% and back, then saves it again, as a JPEG at quality 92 if you gave it a JPEG; Maximum disruption repaints it. The tool shows a similarity score for the change, but don’t count on the download keeping the original colour profile. If all you want is the location gone, the phone and computer options above, ExifTool, or our free EXIF remover are the better fit; the remover gives you the lossless copy itself, pixels and colour profile untouched.

Second, rotation, which cost us a bug. A camera can store a photo sideways and add an Orientation tag (0x0112) telling viewers to turn it. Our cleaner used to remove that tag with the rest of EXIF, so a photo stored that way could come out on its side. It now writes Orientation back on its own, the only EXIF tag a cleaned JPEG keeps, and the download is turned upright before it is saved. Since 24 September 2026 a PNG keeps its Orientation the same way. A WebP still loses it, which made no difference in our tests because Chromium ignores the tag in WebP files; our orientation tests have the details.

Where we are worth the sign-in: a file that carries AI metadata or Content Credentials alongside the camera tags, where you want one before-and-after list of everything that went.

Does the platform strip it for you?

Some platforms remove EXIF from the copy other people can download. We haven’t tested which ones, and the lists we found online are third-party tests, not the platforms’ own statements, so we don’t repeat them here. What holds for all of them is simpler. The platform receives your original file, tags included, before it strips anything, and email attachments arrive exactly as you sent them. Strip first.

Removing the tags also doesn’t hide what is in the picture. Google’s own help page on photo locations warns that people can guess where a photo was taken from the landmarks in it.