Remove location data from a photo

Phones write GPS coordinates into every shot. Latitude and longitude to several decimal places are enough to point at one building on a map. One photo taken at home hands over your address.

Classifieds, property listings, interior shots, photos of your kids: there are more situations than you would think where the location must not travel with the picture. Big social networks strip it on upload, but sending the original through a messenger, attaching it to an email, posting it on a forum or sharing a cloud link all carry it through.

The capture date is the same story. Sometimes when a photo was taken is exactly what should not be revealed, and several photos together read as a daily pattern.

The common approach is to re-save the photo so the metadata falls away. Simple, but the image is re-compressed: quality drops and the file often grows. In one test, a 9.2MB photo came out at 16.1MB (+74%).

This tool cuts out only the parts of the file where metadata lives and does not touch a single byte of the compressed image data. The pixels in the result are identical to the original; the size changes by exactly the amount of information removed.

After stripping, the result is read back to confirm the data is really gone. If that check fails, nothing is saved. For a tool like this, the one fatal failure is leaving something behind.

Three steps. Up to 30 photos at once.

1. 1Add photosTap the + button to pick photos. The list marks anything carrying GPS, and shows the capture date where there is one, so you can see what was in there before it goes.
2. 2Choose what to removeLocation (GPS) and Date toggle separately. You cannot turn both off, since with nothing to remove there is nothing to save.
3. 3Save or shareSave downloads the stripped file. Two or more come down as a single ZIP.

The filename is metadata too

Results are renamed to a four-digit random name like IMG_4821.jpg. Original filenames often carry the device and the shot date (IMG_20240315_143022, or PXL_ on a Pixel). A tool name in the filename would tell the recipient you stripped the location, and a timestamp would put a date back onto a file you just removed the date from.

IPTC and XMP are removed wholesale

Dates and locations do not live in one place. Beyond Exif and TIFF, the same values sit duplicated in IPTC and XMP, and if one copy survives, photo software restores the rest from it. IPTC can even hold place names as text ("Ljósavatn, Iceland") rather than coordinates. A browser cannot edit those blocks field by field, so the IPTC and XMP blocks are dropped entirely. Author and copyright fields go with them.

HEIC comes out as JPG

There is no way to edit a HEIC container in a browser, so it is re-encoded to JPG. The data is definitely gone, but the image bytes are no longer the original. JPG, PNG and WebP keep their image bytes intact.

Camera settings stay

What you do not tick is not touched. Camera body, lens and exposure settings are neither location nor date, so they stay. To remove those too, run the file through the format converter once.