How to remove the location from a photo

1 Check the photo first

Open the photo in hexscope. It reads the file in your browser — nothing is uploaded — and says what the photo gives away: where it was taken, the camera and lens, the camera's serial number, the owner's name if the camera recorded one, and the exact time with its time zone. Each line points at the bytes that hold it.

Check a photo Try a sample photo

This location data is part of EXIF, the block of camera information that JPEG photos carry. An iPhone's HEIC photos carry the same block, and so do PNG images saved from a photo — sometimes twice, as some programs repeat it in a second block of metadata called XMP.

2 Remove it from one photo

Under What this photo reveals, press Remove it — save a clean copy. hexscope saves a copy without the camera data, the location and the serial numbers — and for a JPEG, without its thumbnail and comments too. The picture itself is copied byte for byte, so nothing is recompressed and nothing loses quality. A photo taken sideways keeps only its orientation, so it still shows the right way up. It works for JPEG, HEIC, AVIF and PNG.

Then press Open the clean copy and check it yourself: the card should say there is nothing left.

On a phone, for a photo you are about to share:

• iPhone: in the share sheet, tap Options at the top and turn off Location. To remove it from the photo in your library, open it, swipe up, tap Adjust next to the map and choose No Location.
• Android: in Google Photos, swipe up on a photo to see its details, where the location can be edited or removed. Other gallery apps have a similar option; the wording differs.

3 Stop the phone adding it

• iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never.
• Android: in the camera app's settings, turn off the option to save or tag the location. Its name depends on the phone's maker.

Photos you have already taken keep their location. Only new ones are affected.

4 When the location leaks, and when it does not

Services that recompress photos — most social networks, and messaging apps when you send a picture as a picture — usually drop this data on the way. Everything that sends the file as it is keeps it: email attachments, cloud links, AirDrop unless you switch it off in Options, and messaging apps when you send the photo as a file or a document.

Rules change and every app is different. The only way to be sure is to check the file you are about to send.

5 What else a photo says

• The camera and lens, and often the serial number of the camera body — the same in every photo it takes.
• The owner's name, if it was set in the camera.
• The date and time, to the second, with the time zone.
• The software that edited it.
• A small thumbnail of the picture. Some editors do not update it, so a cropped photo can still carry a preview of the uncropped one.

Check a photo now Nothing leaves your browser.