How to remove location from a photo on any device (and why the gallery button often isn't enough)

Short answer: to remove location from a photo, clean the file you're about to send, not the entry in your gallery. On iPhone, turn Location off under Options in the share sheet. On a computer, strip the GPS tags or rebuild the image from its pixels. Then open the file in a metadata viewer and confirm the coordinates are gone.

The reason for the emphasis: a phone photo's location lives in more than one place. There is the GPS block inside the file, and there is the record your photo app keeps about it. Many "remove location" buttons only change the second one. Google's own help pages say outright that Google Photos can't remove a location your camera saved. Most guides ranking for this question still tell you to tap Remove location there.

Three different things a "remove location" button can change

Before picking a method, know which of these it touches:

1. The copy you send. A share-time toggle strips location from the file leaving your phone this once. The original keeps it.
2. Your library's record. The gallery stops showing a place, but the original file, or the app's backup of it, may still hold the coordinates.
3. The file itself. The GPS tags are gone from the actual file, so every later copy is clean too.

Only the third is permanent. Only the first and third affect what the recipient gets.

iPhone and iPad

Apple's personal safety guide documents three steps:

• Per share: tap the Share button, tap Options, and turn Location off. The sheet then shows Location Not Included. Look for that label before you pick a destination.
• In the library: open the photo, tap the More button, then Adjust Info → Adjust Location → No Location.
• For new photos: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never. Apple says photos only get location if the Camera app has Location Services access.

The catch is that the share toggle only appears when you start from Photos. Pick the photo from inside another app and you never see it. The full walkthrough, including the Live Photo video that carries its own location tag, is in how to remove location from photos on iPhone.

Android

Start by stopping new tags. The setting lives in the camera app, not the system location toggle: Save location on Pixel, Location tags on Samsung, or something with "location" or "GPS" in the name on other brands.

For photos you already have, here's the part most guides get wrong. Google's Photos help page on locations says you can only update or remove estimated locations, and that if a location was added automatically by your camera, you can't update or remove it in Google Photos. So Remove location in Google Photos does nothing to the GPS block your camera wrote into the file.

Google Photos does control location when you share inside its own system. Shared albums have a per-album Share photo locations switch, and Google says locations it estimated aren't shared. That covers sharing through Google Photos. It does nothing for a file you download, attach or upload somewhere else.

Samsung Gallery and some other galleries offer a location option in the share sheet, which cleans that one share. Menu names vary by version, so check the result. Our Android guide covers Pixel and Samsung in detail, and the Motion Photo video hidden inside some Android JPEGs.

Windows

Right-click the photo, choose Properties, open the Details tab and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. Choose Create a copy with all possible properties removed. The copy appears next to the original.

It's quick and needs no software. It's also the method with the most user complaints. Threads on Microsoft's own Q&A forum report the GPS fields surviving on some Windows versions. It only covers formats Windows can edit, and it removes what Windows knows how to edit, not every block in the file. Treat the copy as unverified until you've checked it (see below).

Mac

In the Photos app, select one or more photos and choose Image → Location → Hide Location. Apple documents this alongside Revert to Original Location. That revert option tells you the original coordinates are kept, so think of Hide Location as a library change rather than proof about any file you export later. Export a copy and check it.

Any device: clean the file itself

When the photo is going somewhere you don't control, or you're sending a batch of old ones, skip the menus and clean the file.

Rebuild it from pixels. Remove GPS from photo draws the image to a canvas in your browser and saves a new file from the pixels alone. A canvas holds only pixels, so every metadata block is dropped: EXIF with its GPS tags, XMP, IPTC and C2PA. It works the same in Safari on an iPhone, Chrome on Android, or any desktop browser. No file is uploaded anywhere, which matters here. An online cleaner that uploads your photo has received the coordinates before it hands you a clean copy.

The trade-offs: it accepts JPEG, PNG and WebP, not HEIC, so convert iPhone HEIC photos first (converting alone doesn't clean them). And JPEGs are re-saved at quality 0.95, so the result is a new encode rather than a bit-identical copy. Keep the original if you need it untouched.

Or use ExifTool on a computer, which edits tags without re-encoding the image:

exiftool -gps:all= photo.jpg

That removes the EXIF GPS block, which is where cameras and phones write coordinates. Two things to know. ExifTool keeps a backup called photo.jpg_original with the location still inside it, so delete it or add -overwrite_original. And ExifTool's FAQ notes that GPS can be stored in metadata formats other than EXIF, such as XMP, so check the result rather than assuming. To remove everything, not just location, see how to remove all metadata from an image.

Location that isn't GPS coordinates

Removing the GPS tags removes coordinates. A few other things can still point to a place:

• Place names. Photo managers can write a city, region or country into IPTC or XMP text fields. They aren't GPS tags, so -gps:all= leaves them. A full pixel rebuild removes them.
• Live Photos and Motion Photos. The short video attached to the still has its own location tag. Send a still, or clean the video separately with the video metadata cleaner.
• Estimates from context. Google Photos says it estimates locations from landmarks and from the locations of your other photos. Those estimates live in Google's records, not your file, but they mean the place can be inferred even after the GPS tags are gone.

Check the file you're actually sending

Whatever you used, check the exact file that will leave your device: the exported copy, the Windows copy, the cleaned download. Not the original, and not the gallery's info panel.

Drop it into the image metadata viewer, which reads the file in your browser, or run:

exiftool -a "-gps*" -ee photo.jpg

No output means no GPS tags. Run the same check once on a photo you know is geotagged, so you know the check itself works.

What this doesn't protect against

• What the photo shows. A street sign, a house number, a view from a window or a landmark can place you with no metadata at all. No metadata tool edits the picture.
• Copies that already left. A cloud backup, an earlier message or an earlier upload got the original. Cleaning your copy now doesn't reach theirs.
• The account and the upload. Removing location doesn't make you anonymous. The platform still knows who posted it, when, and from which connection.
• Platform behaviour you can't see. Some sites strip GPS from the copies they show the public, but they receive the original first, and behaviour varies. Which platforms strip EXIF covers what's known, but clean the file before you upload rather than counting on it.

The short version

Share-time toggles clean one share. Gallery buttons mostly change the gallery, and Google Photos can't remove camera GPS at all. For a file that's clean wherever it goes, strip the GPS with ExifTool or rebuild the photo from pixels. Then check the exact file you're about to send.