What Your Photos Reveal: EXIF Data and How to Remove It

Updated 27 October 2026 · by the My Gadgets team

Most photos taken on a phone carry hidden metadata — often including the GPS coordinates of where you were standing, accurate to a few metres. Some apps remove it when you post; many routes for sending a file do not. Before you share a photo taken at home, at your children's school or anywhere you would rather not pin on a map, check what it carries and strip what you don't want to send. This article shows what is in there, when it leaks, and how to remove it in a minute.

What is EXIF data?

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a block of information a camera writes into every JPG, HEIC and many other image files, alongside the picture itself. You don't see it when you look at the photo, but any app that reads the file can.

What it can contain:

The GPS fields are the ones that matter. A photo of your new sofa posted on a marketplace, with GPS intact, tells a stranger which building it is in.

Does my phone add location to photos?

On most phones, yes, unless you have turned it off:

• iPhone: the Camera saves location when it has permission. Check Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera. "Never" stops it for new photos; "While Using the App" keeps it on.
• Android: depends on the camera app. In Google Camera, look for Save location in the camera's settings. Other manufacturers use similar names, such as "Location tags".

Turning location off is a reasonable default if you rarely use the "photos on a map" feature. If you like that feature, leave it on and remove location only from the photos you share.

When does location leak?

The same photo can lose its metadata or keep all of it depending on how you send it. At the time of writing:

The pattern: anything that sends the original file keeps the metadata. People often send photos "as a document" precisely to avoid quality loss, and that is the route that preserves everything.

Platform behaviour changes, so treat any service not listed as keeping metadata until you have checked a downloaded copy yourself.

How do I see what a photo contains?

Open it in Extract EXIF. It lists every field the file carries and highlights the GPS rows (a filter shows only those), so you can see at a glance whether a location is recorded. If there are no GPS rows, the location was never saved or has already been stripped.

This is also the quickest way to check whether an app really removed metadata: share the photo to yourself through that app, download the result, and open it in Extract EXIF.

How do I remove it?

Before sharing from an iPhone

In the share sheet, tap Options at the top and turn off Location. That removes location from the copy you send, for that share only. It does not remove the date or device details.

Any photo, on any device

Open the photo in Remove EXIF, choose the output format, and download the clean copy. For a whole album, choose all the photos at once: one button cleans them all and they come back as a single ZIP. The tool redraws the image and saves it fresh, so all metadata is dropped, not just location. Two things to know:

• Because it re-saves the image, a JPG is re-encoded at the quality you choose (92 by default). The difference is not visible at normal viewing sizes, but don't run the same photo through repeatedly.
• iPhone HEIC photos need converting first with HEIC to JPG, which also drops the location data as a side effect.

Resizing with Resize Image or converting with Convert Image Format strips metadata the same way, so if you are already shrinking a photo for upload, you are cleaning it too.

All of these run in your browser. That matters here more than anywhere: uploading a photo to an online "EXIF remover" means sending the original, coordinates included, to a stranger's server in order to have the coordinates removed.

What metadata can't fix

Removing EXIF removes what is in the file. It does nothing about what is in the picture:

• A house number, street sign or car plate in the background.
• A school logo on a uniform, or a name badge.
• A view from your window that locals would recognise.
• Reflections in mirrors, windows and sunglasses.

Crop those out with Crop Image, or cover them in Blur Image: choose Only areas I select, drag over each one, and pick Solid black box. A solid box is safer than a blur, which can sometimes be partly reversed.

Quick answers

Do screenshots have location data? No GPS, because a screenshot is not taken by the camera. They usually record the device and time, and the content of the screen is often more revealing than any metadata.

Does deleting location from my phone's gallery remove it from photos I already sent? No. Copies that have left your device keep whatever they carried.

Is EXIF proof of when and where a photo was taken? No. It is easy to edit, and camera clocks are often wrong. Treat it as a clue, not evidence.

Should I remove EXIF from every photo? From anything you share publicly or with people you don't know, yes. For your own archive, keep the originals: the date and location are useful to you.

What to do next

Check a photo with Extract EXIF, clean it with Remove EXIF, and crop out anything identifying with Crop Image. If you are also choosing a format for the cleaned copy, see which image format to use.