How to remove EXIF data and GPS coordinates from photos before sharing

Every photo a digital camera or smartphone takes carries an invisible payload of metadata. The format is called EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), and it's been in JPEG files since the late 1990s. The data EXIF stores is a mix of stuff you'd want (camera model, lens, ISO, shutter speed — the things photographers care about for organizing libraries) and stuff you very much don't want strangers to have. The headline item in the second category is GPS coordinates — the location where the photo was taken, accurate to within a few meters on most modern phones. If location services were on when you took the photo, your photo files contain a record of where you were.

What's actually in your photo's EXIF

On a recent iPhone or Android, a single photo typically embeds:

GPS latitude and longitude, plus the GPS-derived altitude.
Device model — exact phone make and model, including the camera lens used (front vs. back, wide vs. ultrawide).
Capture timestamp with timezone, accurate to the second.
Camera settings — ISO, shutter speed, aperture, focal length, flash status, exposure mode.
Software identifier — sometimes the OS version, sometimes the app that took the photo.
Image orientation (so the photo displays the right way up).
Sometimes face detection regions, image-quality scores, and other internal flags.

The location data is the dangerous one. Sharing a photo with GPS coordinates means sharing where you were when the photo was taken. A photo of your dog in the living room contains the GPS coordinates of your home. A photo of your kid at school contains the GPS coordinates of the school. A photo of you at a restaurant on Instagram contains the location of the restaurant. Most social platforms strip EXIF on upload (so the version your followers see is clean), but EXIF travels with the file — when you email a photo, when you upload to a cloud storage service, when you attach a photo to a contract, the original metadata is right there.

How to inspect and strip EXIF

Use our EXIF Viewer / Stripper. Drop a photo and the tool shows every metadata field that's present, highlighting GPS coordinates in red with a one-click link to the location in OpenStreetMap (so you can see exactly what a malicious recipient could see). The Strip button re-encodes the image without any metadata and offers the clean version as a download.

The strip operation is a canvas re-encode — the photo is decoded to pixels, those pixels are drawn to a hidden canvas, and the canvas is exported as a fresh JPG or PNG. The output is byte-different from the input (it has no metadata) and the file size shrinks slightly because EXIF blocks were taking some bytes. Visual quality is preserved at the configured JPEG quality (default 95% — close enough to lossless that you won't notice unless you're zooming pixel-by-pixel).

Step-by-step

Open EXIF Viewer / Stripper.
Drop a JPG, PNG, WebP, or HEIC photo. The tool parses metadata using exifr, a JavaScript library that reads EXIF entirely in your browser.
Review what's in the file. If GPS data is present, it appears at the top in a red callout with a "View on map" link.
Click Strip metadata and download. The output filename gets a -stripped suffix.
Verify by re-uploading the stripped version to the same tool — you should see "No EXIF metadata found".

When stripping is and isn't enough

Stripping EXIF removes the standard metadata fields that 99% of EXIF readers surface. It does not remove:

Embedded thumbnails. Some older cameras and software embed a small thumbnail of the original photo inside the EXIF block. Most stripping tools (including this one) remove the entire EXIF block, so embedded thumbnails go with it. But if the photo has gone through a tool that partially strips EXIF, the embedded thumbnail might survive — and that thumbnail might still carry GPS in its own metadata.
Watermarks baked into the pixels. If the photo has a visible watermark, that's part of the image and a metadata strip won't touch it. Use an image editor.
Steganographic information. Any data hidden in the pixel values themselves (some cameras embed maker-specific data this way) survives a canvas re-encode unless the re-encoding is lossy enough to destroy it (JPEG compression at 80% or lower typically does).
The face / content of the photo. If the photo shows your living room window, the GPS coordinate isn't the only signal — the visible scene can also give away location to someone who knows the area. Metadata stripping addresses the machine-readable part; the visible content is up to you.

Alternative approaches and when to use them

iOS Photos app: Share → Options → Location: Off. When you share a photo directly from Photos, you can toggle off the location data for the specific share. The original file in your library keeps the GPS; only the shared copy is clean. Good for one-off shares; doesn't help for files you exported and want to clean up later.
Android: Photos app → Share → Location chip → Remove. Same idea, same caveat.
exiftool at the command line (the canonical metadata tool). exiftool -all= photo.jpg strips all metadata from a JPG. Run exiftool -gps:all= photo.jpg to strip only the GPS fields. Free, very thorough, requires a command-line install.
ImageOptim (macOS) or FileOptimizer (Windows). Both have EXIF stripping built in alongside image-size optimization. Useful when you're already optimizing files.
Photoshop / Affinity Photo / Lightroom. All have "Export without metadata" options. Overkill for the strip-only case.

Privacy considerations

This is an actively-attacked vector. There have been multiple real-world incidents where EXIF data leaked sensitive locations: a "vacation home" photo led to a burglary, a "leaked corporate document" was traced back to the executive's home address via the photo of their printer, John McAfee was located via EXIF in a 2012 Vice interview photo. The threat model isn't "malicious nation-state"; it's "anyone who downloads the file and runs exiftool on it" or "any service that processes uploaded images for metadata indexing". Both happen routinely.

The browser-based EXIF reading and stripping in this tool has no network step. The photo never crosses to a server. exifr (the EXIF parser) is a JS library that runs in your tab. The canvas re-encode for stripping is a browser operation in your tab. Open DevTools Network panel during use and you'll see zero requests — exactly the behavior you want for files containing your location.

Related tools and guides

EXIF Viewer / Stripper — the tool this guide covers.
Compress Image — re-encode to a smaller file (also strips EXIF as a side effect).
HEIC to JPG — the iPhone-photo convert workflow also drops metadata in the process.
How to convert HEIC to JPG.
How to compress images for the web.