How to remove location from photos on iPhone (and check it's really gone)

Short answer: to remove location from photos on an iPhone, turn off Location under Options in the share sheet before you send. To change the photo in your library, open it, tap the info button, tap Adjust under the map and choose No Location. To stop tagging new photos, set Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera to Never.

Those three steps are in every guide. What most guides leave out is that each one changes something different. One cleans a single share, one edits your library, and one only affects photos you haven't taken yet. None of them is a guarantee about the file that actually leaves your phone. The rest of this page covers which one to use when, and how to check the result.

The three built-in options, and what each one really changes

1. Per share: the Options toggle

Select one or more photos in Photos, tap the Share button, then tap Options near the top of the share sheet. Turn Location off. Apple's own instructions say the sheet then shows Location Not Included above the Options button. Check for that label before you tap a destination.

This is the most dependable built-in method, because it acts on the copy being sent. But it only exists when you start from the share sheet. If you open Instagram, WhatsApp or a website and pick the photo from inside that app, you never see this toggle.

Several outlets report that iOS 18.2 added a per-app version of the same idea, under Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos, where apps using the photo picker list what to include and Location can be turned off. Apple's own personal-safety guide doesn't document it, and it doesn't appear for every app, so treat it as a bonus worth looking for rather than something to rely on — the share-sheet toggle above is the dependable one.

2. In your library: Adjust → No Location

Open the photo, tap the info button (or swipe up), tap Adjust under the map, and choose No Location. On some iOS versions the path runs through the More menu instead: Adjust Info → Adjust Location → No Location.

Two things to know about this one:

• It is reversible. You can choose Revert later and the original location comes back. That means iOS keeps the original coordinates. Photos edits are layered on top of the original rather than destroying it. For most people that's fine. Just don't think of it as having erased anything from the phone.
• It goes one photo at a time. There is no built-in way to clear location from your whole library on the iPhone. The Photos app on a Mac can do a selection at once (Image → Location → Hide Location), if your library syncs there.

Whether the copy you later share leaves out the coordinates can depend on how the file leaves the phone. That's why the last section of this page matters more than any menu path.

3. For the future: turn off Camera location

Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never. Apple's guide is explicit that photos and videos only get location if the Camera app has Location Services access, so this stops it at the source.

It is not retroactive. Every photo you took before flipping it still has its coordinates. If your phone seems to keep tagging photos anyway, why your iPhone photos still have location data when GPS is off walks through the other places location is stored.

The Live Photo gap

A Live Photo is two files: the still and a short .mov video. The video carries its own QuickTime location tag, separate from the still's EXIF. If you hand a Live Photo to a tool that only reads the still, the video comes through untouched.

The simplest fix is to send it as a still: in Photos, tap Edit, tap the Live Photo button and turn Live off for that photo before sharing.

If you do need the motion, clean the .mov separately. The video metadata cleaner accepts MOV files and remuxes them with the metadata dropped. It copies the video and audio streams without re-encoding them.

For files that need to be clean: rebuild from pixels

If you're sending a batch of old photos, or a file that will be shared more than once, clean the file itself rather than relying on a toggle you have to remember every time.

Remove GPS from photo runs in Safari on the iPhone. It draws the image to a canvas and saves a new file from the pixels. A canvas only holds pixels, so EXIF, XMP and the GPS tags inside them are all dropped. Nothing is uploaded. The file never leaves the phone while it's cleaned.

Two honest caveats. JPEGs are re-saved at quality 0.95, so the result is a new encode and not bit-identical to the original. And the tool takes JPEG, PNG and WebP, not HEIC, so convert iPhone HEIC photos to JPEG first, or set Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible for future photos. Converting alone is not a cleaning step: most converters copy the GPS straight across (details here).

Check the file, not the Photos app

The info panel in Photos shows the library's record, not necessarily what's inside the file you send. To know what the recipient gets, check the file:

1. Share the photo the way you really will (AirDrop to a computer, Save to Files, email it to yourself).
2. Open the image metadata viewer and drop the file in, or run:

exiftool -GPS:all -a -G1 photo.jpg

Empty output means no GPS. Run the same check once on a photo you know has location. A check that can't find GPS in a tagged photo proves nothing.

What this doesn't protect against

• What's in the picture. A house number, a street sign or the view from your window gives a location away with no metadata at all.
• Copies that already left. iCloud, a cloud backup or any app you've already uploaded to received the original. Cleaning your copy now doesn't change theirs.
• The account and the upload. Removing location from a file doesn't make you anonymous. The platform still knows who posted, when and from which connection.
• Other metadata. The Options toggle and No Location only touch location. Date, time and the iPhone model still go with the file. If those matter too, rebuild the file from pixels as above.

Which one should you use?

• One photo, sending right now: the share sheet Options → Location toggle, and check for "Location Not Included".
• Stop it happening again: Camera location set to Never.
• Old photos, batches, or anything uploaded from inside another app: clean a copy with remove GPS from photo, then check it once.

Related: the Android version of this guide, and which platforms strip EXIF when you upload.