Remove the location from a photo

Apple puts it this way for the iPhone: when Location Services is on for the Camera app, the camera uses cellular, Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth information to find the coordinates where a photo is taken, and stores them in the photo. When you share that photo, the people you share it with may be able to read the location and learn where it was taken.

That is useful in your own library. It is how Photos puts your pictures on a map and finds "the photos from Lisbon". It is less useful in a photo of your new bike in front of your door that you post in a marketplace listing, or in a picture of your child that you send to a group you only half know.

The location can sit in more than one place in the file:

• The GPS fields hold the latitude and the longitude, and often the altitude, the direction the camera pointed, and the time of the position fix.
• Place names hold the city, the region, and the country as words. Photo apps and news tools write them into the IPTC and XMP blocks of the file.
• GPS properties in XMP repeat the position in the text block that editing apps write.

To take the location out of a file, clear it in each of the three. This tool reads all three and shows you what it found before you remove anything.

Taken out

Every GPS field: position, altitude, direction, speed, and time of the fix. The place names in IPTC: city, sublocation, region, country, and country code. The place names and every GPS property in XMP.

Stays

The date and the time, the camera and the lens, the exposure, the software, captions and keywords, the color profile, and the orientation.

The picture

The compressed picture data stays byte for byte. The copy has the same pixels and the same quality as your original.

After the removal, the page shows a report with two lists, Removed and Kept. Read the Kept list once: it tells you what the person who gets the photo can still see.

Maker data, and why the tool tells you about it

Many cameras write a block of their own into the photo, in a format that only the camera maker knows. The tool keeps that block as it is, unread, and marks it Kept, not checked in the report. To take that block out too, use Remove all metadata.

Damaged or unknown data

When a block of metadata is damaged or unknown, the tool removes that block whole and says so in the report, because a block that it has not read could hold a location. From an EXIF block it keeps the orientation when it can read it, so that the photo still shows the right way up.

Only the location, or everything?

Keep the date and the camera when they help the person who gets the photo: a family album sorts by date, and a photographer wants the lens and the exposure. Use Remove all metadata, the second button, when the photo goes to a stranger or to a public page: a listing, a forum, a review. The date and the phone model say more about you than a stranger needs.

One thing no metadata tool can do: change what the picture shows. A street sign, a house number, or a view from your window tells the place too. For those, cover that part of the photo.

JPEG

The GPS part is cut out of the EXIF block, and the place names are cut out of IPTC and XMP. The rest of each block stays.

HEIC

The High Efficiency format of the iPhone camera. The location is overwritten in place, so the file keeps its size. The tool reads and changes HEIC in every browser. The preview in the frame appears where the browser can show HEIC, as Safari does.

PNG

A PNG can carry the location in an EXIF chunk or in a text chunk with XMP. The tool takes it out of both.

WebP

The location is taken out of the EXIF and XMP chunks. The picture and the color profile stay.

The download keeps the format and the name of your file, with -no-location added to the name. A photo with no location in it comes back unchanged, and the page says that there was nothing to remove.

The iPhone has three controls for the location of a photo. Apple lists them in its guide Manage location metadata in Photos.

1. For one share. In Photos, select the photos, tap the Share button, tap Options, and turn off Location. The sheet then reads "Location Not Included". The switch is for the share you are making now, and the photo in your library keeps its place.
2. For one photo in your library. Open the photo, tap the More button, then Adjust Info, Adjust Location, and No Location.
3. For every new photo. Go to Settings, then Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera, and tap Never.

Those controls work on photos in the Photos library, on an iPhone. This tool is for the other cases:

• The photo is a file: in Files, in a download, in an email, on a memory card, on a computer.
• The photo came from another phone or camera.
• You want to see the location first, as numbers, and see the proof that it is gone afterward.
• You are on an Android phone, a Windows PC, or a Mac. The tool works the same in each browser.

In Safari on an iPhone, Choose a photo lets you pick from the Photos library or from Files. The tool then shows the location in the file that Safari hands to it. Safari saves the new copy to the Downloads folder, which you find in the Files app.

A tool that takes your location out of a photo should do its work where the photo already is. This one runs in your browser, on your own phone or computer. The browser hands the file to the tool in memory, the tool makes the new copy in memory, and the download is saved from the browser to your device.

To see that for yourself on a computer:

1. Open the developer tools of the browser and select the Network panel.
2. Choose a photo and remove its location.
3. Read the list of requests. The page's own files come down from milkglass.app, among them the tool's program, a file that ends in .wasm.
4. Look for a request that carries your photo up. A photo has several megabytes, so it would stand out. The list has none.

One more address is in the list: ingest.postdeploy.dev. It counts page views, and it counts that the tool was used. The count names the tool and holds nothing about the file: no name, no size, no content, no position. Open the request and read what it sends.

The site's content security policy names milkglass.app and that one counting address, and the browser blocks a connection to every other origin.

A copy without its location is for sharing. For the photos you keep to yourself, I make Milkglass, an app that keeps them in Drawers on your iPhone. More about it is at the end of this page.

• View and remove photo metadata lists what it finds in a photo file and removes it. A block that it cannot read is removed whole.
• Cover or pixelate part of a photo hides what the picture itself shows: a street sign, a house number, a license plate.