Your photos show your location, here’s how you can hide it

Did you know that when you take photos on your smartphone your location and a lot of detailed info about your phone and camera settings will get saved to that photo file? And when you share that photo online, a lot of times that location info gets passed on with your photos.

Having the GPS info and other metadata saved in each photo you take is often great. It allows you to browse your photo library based on the locations where you’ve taken photos, it helps your phone create those fun automatic highlight videos because it knows you were away from home, maybe at a fun vacation destination. But there’s also a downside of saving location info to every single photo you take. Sharing these photos with others or posting them publicly on the internet will share your exact location with everyone who can view the photo, and sometimes that’s not something you want.

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How to remove location info from photos on a Mac

If you’re on a Mac, you can simply open a photo in the Preview app and use the inspector to view metadata and location info. To view the inspector you can hit Command + I or head to the top of your screen and in your menu bar choose Tools -> Show Inspector.

In the inspector window, you’ll see an info tab, and under that, you’ll see the GPS info if your photo contains that. And right under the map view, you’ll have an option to remove location info. Click that and the location info will be removed. Don’t forget to save your photo after doing this.

How to remove location info from photos on an iPhone

If you want to remove location info on your iPhone you can simply open up any photo in the Photos app and tap the information button on the bottom of your screen. If the photo contains location info you’ll see a map view on the bottom of your screen. When you scroll down a bit you’ll see a button that says “Adjust” on the bottom right corner. Tap that and choose “No location”, and the location info will get removed from your photo.

How to remove all metadata from your photos on a Mac

If you want to go a little deeper and remove all metadata, not just location info, you can do that with a free 3rd party application called Image Optim. Image Optim is a great tool for optimizing still images for online use and it’s main purpose is to optimize your photos for the best possible image quality while compressing the file size down as much as possible without losing quality. What’s nice about Image Optim is that it also works great from stripping metadata off your photos.

Simply drag & drop your photos in the Image Optim window and it will automatically optimize your photo and remove all metadata. One thing to note is that it currently doesn’t support HEIC photos, so if your phone saved photos in that format, you’ll have to convert them first to a more compatible format using Preview or another similar application.