How to remove location and other metadata from photos

When a camera or a phone saves a photo, it writes more than the picture. A block of metadata, called EXIF, records the device, the settings, the date and time and, on phones, often the location. Most people never see it, because photo viewers hide it. Anyone who receives the original file can read it in a few seconds.

To see how much stays attached in practice, we read the metadata of nine photos that photographers had published on Wikimedia Commons, freely downloadable by anyone.

What nine published photos still told us

None of the nine had a location, which is what you would expect from careful photographers using cameras without GPS. Everything else was there, years after the photos were published. The serial number is the most underrated item: it is the same in every photo from that camera, so it can tie pictures posted under different names, on different sites, to one device. There are services that search the web for a serial number to find photos taken with a stolen camera, which shows how well it works as an identifier.

What a location looks like

Phone cameras save the position whenever they are allowed to use location, and most people allow it once and forget. To show what that looks like, we added a position to a copy of one photo: the Eiffel Tower, 48.85837 north and 2.29448 east. It took 138 bytes, stored as degrees, minutes and hundredths of a second, which is precise to about 30 centimetres. A phone's GPS is usually accurate to a few metres outdoors, so a photo taken at home points to the house.

Our metadata remover read it straight back as a location and listed it with the camera, the dates and the serial number before cleaning. Photos taken on a phone often add more: the phone model, the direction the camera faced, altitude and the time zone.

Does removing metadata change the photo?

It should not, and you can check. A JPEG file is a series of blocks: the metadata blocks come first and the picture data comes last. A careful remover drops the metadata blocks and copies the picture data as it is, without decoding and saving the photo again.

We cleaned all nine photos with the metadata remover and compared the picture data before and after. It was identical byte for byte in every file. The files lost between 9 and 38 KB each, the size of the metadata and the small preview pictures that cameras embed. The colour profile and the rotation flag were kept, so the photos look and turn exactly as before.

Converting or compressing a photo usually drops the metadata too, because the picture is saved again from scratch. That works, but it also changes the picture. If you only want the metadata gone, remove it without re-encoding.

When does a photo keep its metadata?

It depends on whether the file is passed along as it is, or processed on the way. As a rule:

• Usually kept: email attachments, files sent as documents in messaging apps, cloud storage links, file transfers between devices, and photos uploaded to many websites that offer the original for download.
• Usually removed: photos posted to the large social networks and sent as normal photos in the big messaging apps, which shrink and recompress them.

Services change their handling over time, and "usually" is not a guarantee. If it matters, remove the metadata yourself before the photo leaves your device, or test a service: send a photo, download it on the other side and open it in the metadata remover to see what survived.

How to remove location and metadata from photos

1. Open the metadata remover and drop one or more photos. JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and HEIC files work.
2. Each photo shows what it carries: location, device, dates, author and serial number.
3. Click Strip metadata and download the clean copies, one by one or as a ZIP.

The photos are read and cleaned in your browser and are not uploaded, which would rather defeat the purpose.

Stop the location being saved

• iPhone: in Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, Camera, choose Never. To keep location for yourself but leave it out when sharing, tap Options at the top of the share sheet and turn off Location.
• Android: open the camera app's settings and turn off the option to save or tag location. The name varies between phone makers.
• Cameras with GPS or a phone link: turn off location in the camera menu or in the companion app.