A photo taken at home, about to be posted publicly. This is an illustration — no real file, name or location is used.
Before — what you would be sending
balcony-sunset.HEICHEIC
Exact location51.503364, -0.119543
Camera ownerA. Whitfield
Camera serial numberF2LX9K3QW1
Apple · iPhone 15 Pro · 14 Aug 2026, 19:42
After cleaning
balcony-sunset-clean.HEICHEIC
Exact locationremoved
Camera ownerremoved
Camera serial numberremoved
Every pixel identical. Nothing is re-compressed, so there is no quality loss.
The coordinates are in the file, not in the picture
Location data is not something you can see by looking at an image. It sits in a separate block of the file called EXIF, alongside the camera model and the shutter speed. Anyone who receives the file can read it in seconds, and on most phones it is on by default.
How precise it actually is
A modern phone records latitude and longitude to six decimal places, which resolves to roughly a metre. It often stores altitude too, which on a tall building narrows things down to a floor. This is enough to identify a specific flat, not just a neighbourhood.
The pictures that give away the most
Not holiday photos. The dangerous ones are the ordinary shots taken at home: a pet on the sofa, a delivery that arrived, a whiteboard in a home office, an item being sold second-hand. Those are the ones people post without thinking, and they are all tagged with the same set of coordinates.
Turning it off is not retroactive
Disabling location for the camera app stops new photos being tagged. Every photo already in your library keeps what it was given. If you are about to send an old one, check it rather than assume.
In practice
How to read the coordinates yourself
Coordinates arrive as three rational numbers — degrees, minutes and seconds — plus a single letter for the hemisphere. To turn 28 degrees, 32 minutes, 7.8 seconds into something a map understands, divide the minutes by 60 and the seconds by 3600 and add them: 28 + 0.5333 + 0.00217, which gives 28.53550. Paste that with the longitude into any mapping service and it drops a pin. The whole conversion takes fifteen seconds, which is the point: this is not a technical barrier to anyone who receives your file.
The settings that actually stop it
On iPhone, Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, Camera, then choose Never. On Android the control sits inside the camera app itself, usually under a heading like Location tags or Save location. Both stop new photographs being tagged and neither touches your existing library. There is a second, easier route for one-off shares on iOS: in the share sheet, tap Options at the top and turn off Location. It works, but it resets each time and only covers coordinates, not the device details or the timestamp.
Where people are caught out
Marketplace listings are the common one. Someone photographs a bicycle in the hallway, posts it on a local selling site, and a stranger who wants that bicycle now has the address. The second is a pet photograph posted publicly by someone who is otherwise careful about their location. The third is subtler: a photograph taken at a friend's house, which gives away their address rather than yours, and which they never agreed to.
Common questions
Can someone find my address from a photo I sent them?
If the photo still has its EXIF GPS tags and was taken at your home, yes. The coordinates can be pasted straight into any mapping service.
Does turning off location services remove GPS from old photos?
No. It only affects photos taken afterwards. Existing files keep the coordinates they were saved with.
How do I remove the location from a photo?
Drop it into the tool on this page and choose Clean and download. The image pixels are left completely untouched.