How to Remove Location Data from Photos on Windows

Photo metadata, known as EXIF, can include the GPS coordinates where a photo was taken, the date and time, and the make and model of the phone or camera.

It can also hold lens and exposure settings, the software that edited the photo, comments and editing history. Phone cameras record the location whenever they have permission to. To check a photo on Windows, right-click it in File Explorer, choose Properties and open the Details tab: a GPS section with Latitude and Longitude means it has a location. In File Acture, photos that carry coordinates show “Has location” in the file list.

File Explorer can strip properties from several photos at once: select them, right-click, choose Properties, open the Details tab and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. Choose Create a copy with all possible properties removed and click OK, and Windows writes clean copies while the originals stay as they were.

The other choice, Remove the following properties from this file, lets you tick only the GPS entries, but it changes the original. Either way, Windows removes only the properties it knows how to edit, which works best on JPEG; other formats can keep some or all of their metadata. Open the copy's Details tab afterwards and make sure the GPS section is gone.

File Acture's Remove Metadata deletes location, camera and lens details, dates, comments and editing history from every photo you add, and saves clean copies.

For JPEG, PNG and WebP, only the metadata is removed: the image data isn't re-encoded, so the pixels stay exactly the same. The color profile is kept so colors don't change, and the orientation is kept so photos stay upright. Extra data some phones append to JPEGs, such as motion photo clips or depth maps, is removed too.

HEIC, AVIF and TIFF files can't be cleaned that way, so they're re-encoded at high quality without the metadata; when a format can't be written back, the copy is saved as JPEG or PNG. File Acture reads HEIC and AVIF through the codecs Windows provides, so if Windows can't show those photos, install Microsoft's HEIF Image Extensions and HEVC Video Extensions first (for AVIF, the AV1 Video Extension). Each clean copy gets “-clean” in its name, and the originals are left as they were.

To stop new photos from recording where they were taken, turn location off for the camera. On an iPhone, open Settings, go to Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera and choose Never. On a Google Pixel, turn off Save location in the Camera app's settings; on a Samsung Galaxy, turn off Location tags in the camera settings.

That only affects photos you take from then on. For a photo you share straight from an iPhone, tap Options at the top of the share sheet and turn off Location. Photos already on your PC keep their coordinates until you remove them.

Metadata is only part of what a photo can give away.

• Other tools strip it too. Convert Images, Compress Images and Resize Images remove metadata unless you turn on Keep metadata, so a HEIC to JPG conversion already leaves the location out.
• The picture itself can reveal a place: street signs, house numbers, the view from a window.
• PDFs carry metadata too. Compress PDF can remove a document's title, author and similar fields.
• Sending a set privately? Put the clean photos in a password-protected ZIP.
• Batches: the free version cleans up to 5 photos per run, with 3 runs on each PC; see pricing for Pro.

An online EXIF remover has to receive the photo, location and all, before it can remove anything. File Acture reads and cleans the photos on your PC, so the coordinates never leave it, and the files themselves are never uploaded.

The same question applies to every free online tool: what happens to a file you upload.