Remove GPS location from photos

Your files and your privacy

Your photograph is never uploaded, and neither are its coordinates. The file is read into this browser tab, parsed there, and the cleaned copy is built there from the original bytes. The position is printed as plain numbers and no map is loaded, because requesting a map tile would send your location to another company.

What this tool does

Find out whether a photograph records where it was taken, and write a copy without that location. The coordinates live inside the EXIF block, and removal works by dropping that block, so everything else in it goes at the same time.

A phone with location services enabled writes a GPS sub-directory into the photograph: latitude, longitude, altitude, the direction the camera faced, how fast you were moving and the date you were there. This page reads that sub-directory, converts the degrees-minutes-seconds values into decimal coordinates you can read, and then writes a copy of the file with the metadata block removed. The detail that matters is that removal is not selective: the GPS sub-directory sits inside the EXIF block, and the cleaning step drops that whole block, so the camera make and model, the original timestamp, the exposure settings and the lens details go with the location.

How to use it

1. Choose the JPEG, PNG or WebP you are about to share.
2. Look at the highlighted panel: a readable position is shown as decimal latitude and longitude, to six places.
3. Select Remove metadata, then check the removed list; on a JPEG the entry you are looking for is APP1 (Exif).
4. Select Verify to re-read the cleaned bytes, then download the copy, which is saved with a -no-metadata suffix.

Example use cases

• Removing the position of your home before posting a photograph of something you are selling.
• Clearing the location from pictures taken at a private address before sending them to an insurer or a contractor.

Supported input and output

Accepts

• JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg), PNG (.png) and WebP (.webp), up to 50 MB
• Format detected from magic bytes rather than the file extension

Produces

• A cleaned copy in the same format, saved with a -no-metadata suffix
• Compressed image data identical to the original, byte for byte

What this tool will not do

• Location cannot be removed on its own. There is no setting that takes out only the GPS fields: they live inside the EXIF block, and removing the location means removing that whole block, so the camera make and model, the original date and time, the exposure and lens settings and any owner name go with it.
• Because the EXIF block also holds the Orientation tag, a photograph that relied on it to display upright may appear rotated after cleaning.
• A location written into an XMP packet is removed with that packet, but XMP contents are not parsed for display, so the panel cannot show you what that packet said.
• The coordinate readout needs a latitude and a longitude that both parse. A file can still carry other location fields, such as the GPS date stamp or the image direction, with no coordinate pair to show.
• HEIC and HEIF, the default formats on many recent phones, are not parsed here and are rejected rather than cleaned. The same applies to AVIF, TIFF, DNG, camera RAW, GIF and SVG.
• Removing the location from your copy does nothing about copies you have already sent or uploaded.

Common mistakes

• Expecting only the location to disappear. The removal takes the whole EXIF block, so the timestamp, camera model and exposure data go too, and a photographer who needed those has lost them silently.
• Reading the absence of a coordinate line as the absence of location data: the readout requires both a latitude and a longitude, while fields such as GPSDateStamp or GPSImgDirection can be present on their own.
• Sharing the original rather than the cleaned copy. The download is a new file with a -no-metadata suffix, and the geotagged original stays in your photo library.
• Treating a rejected HEIC as a cleaned photograph. If the tool would not read the file, it did not clean it.

Technical notes

The GPS values are reached through the IFD0 pointer at tag 0x8825, read as rational triples and converted to signed decimal degrees using the hemisphere reference, so a south or west reference produces a negative number. Removal never decodes the picture: in a JPEG the APP1 Exif segment holding that directory is skipped while the remaining marker segments are copied and the entropy-coded scan data is appended verbatim; in a PNG the eXIf chunk is dropped whole, so no CRC is recomputed and IDAT is untouched; in a WebP the EXIF chunk is dropped, the EXIF and XMP presence bits in the VP8X flags byte are cleared, and the RIFF size field is rewritten.

Frequently asked questions

Can I remove the GPS data but keep the camera settings?

No. The location is stored inside the same EXIF block as the make, model, timestamp and exposure fields, and the cleaning step removes that block as a unit. If you need the technical fields, record them from the table before you clean the file.

Why is there no map next to the coordinates?

Because asking for a map tile would hand your location to whichever company serves it, from a tool whose entire promise is that your data stays on your device. The numbers are shown so you can decide for yourself where to paste them.

Does removing the location damage the photo?

The pixels are untouched: the compressed image data is copied through byte for byte, so there is no re-encoding and no quality loss. What can change is display orientation, if the picture depended on the EXIF Orientation tag that was removed with the block.

My iPhone photos are HEIC. Can I clean those?

Not here. The HEIF container is not parsed by this tool, so those files are rejected rather than returned uncleaned. Convert to JPEG first and check the JPEG on this page, because a conversion may or may not carry the GPS fields across.