Strip GPS Location From Photos Before You Share Them

Three places, with three different removal procedures.

The first row is bigger than most people expect. Here is the real GPS block off an iPhone 16 Pro Max photo, tag names only:

GPSLatitudeRef   GPSLatitude    GPSLongitudeRef  GPSLongitude
GPSAltitudeRef   GPSAltitude    GPSTimeStamp     GPSDateStamp
GPSSpeedRef      GPSSpeed       GPSImgDirectionRef  GPSImgDirection
GPSDestBearingRef  GPSDestBearing  GPSHPositioningError

Fifteen tags. Your phone records not just where you stood but how fast you were moving, which way the camera was pointing, and how confident the GPS fix was. That last one, GPSHPositioningError, is the phone telling anyone who reads the file how much to trust the coordinates.

One more thing worth understanding before you start deleting: GPS records where the camera was, not what is in the frame. A test file used throughout this series is a photograph of the Arc de Triomphe whose EXIF coordinates resolve to 1.6 metres from the Eiffel Tower, 1.71 km away, with GPSAltitude at 307.1 m. It was shot with a 200 mm lens from the top observation deck. The metadata locates the photographer precisely and the subject not at all.

Two controls, and they do different things.

Turn it off at capture. Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services › Camera › Never. No coordinates are written into new photos at all. It also breaks Places, Memories and map views for everything you shoot afterwards, which is why most people do not leave it off.

Turn it off per share. In the share sheet, tap Options at the top, then turn off Location. The subtitle above the Options button changes to “Location Not Included.” This has existed since iOS 13.

Apple’s own name for that section is more informative than the label you see. The localized strings inside PhotosUICore.framework on macOS 27 include:

PICKER_OPTIONS_VIEW_SECTION_METADATA_STRIPPING_TITLE            -> "Include"
PICKER_OPTIONS_VIEW_SECTION_METADATA_STRIPPING_LOCATION_TOGGLE -> "Location"
PICKER_OPTIONS_VIEW_SECTION_METADATA_STRIPPING_CAPTION_TOGGLE  -> "Captions"
PICKER_TOOLBAR_SUBTITLE_NO_LOCATION                            -> "Location Not Included"

The section identifier is literally METADATA_STRIPPING, and it contains exactly two toggles. So the control genuinely removes GPS from the shared copy, and it genuinely does not touch the rest of the EXIF block. Camera model, capture timestamp, exposure, ISO, focal length and lens all still travel. Apple’s companion footer string spells out the scope: “Original quality files will include location, live photo and caption metadata.”

There is a third, blunter confirmation that location travels by default. Apple’s Lockdown Mode documentation (updated 14 September 2026) lists this among the protections it turns on:

“When you share photos, location information is excluded.”

Apple only describes that as a Lockdown Mode feature because outside Lockdown Mode it is not the default.

Because Photos is not reading your file. It is reading its own database, and the two are kept deliberately separate.

Open a Photos library’s Photos.sqlite and the asset table carries ZLATITUDE, ZLONGITUDE and ZLOCATIONDATA columns directly. A second table adds ZREVERSELOCATIONDATA, ZSHIFTEDLOCATIONDATA and ZLOCATIONHASH: place names Photos looked up for you, which were never in any EXIF tag. On a library with location services enabled, a large share of assets carry a stored latitude in that table regardless of what the image files themselves contain. Stripping EXIF from an exported copy does not touch any of it.

Apple is careful about the wording in the menu. The command is Hide Location, not Remove Location, and it sits next to Revert to Original Location. You cannot revert a destructive edit. Photos is changing a display flag.

The consequence runs in both directions, and the second one surprises people:

• A file you cleaned with exiftool will still show a pin in Photos, because the library row was never touched.
• A file with no GPS can come out of a Photos export with GPS, if Photos knows a location for it. The Photos binary on macOS 27 exposes a method called gpsDictionaryForLocation: and another called updateMetadataBuilder:withAsset:includeLocation: — export metadata built from the asset record rather than copied from the source file.

If you are exporting from Photos, the control you want is File › Export › Export Photo and then unchecking Location Information. That checkbox is bound to a property named includeLocation in the export dialog’s nib, and it governs whether Photos writes a GPS dictionary into the new file. Export Unmodified Original has no location checkbox at all, because it is a byte copy of the file as imported: it preserves whatever EXIF that file had, and none of what Photos added.

The only reliable check is to run exiftool on the file that actually left your machine, not on what Photos shows you.

The narrow command, and why it is usually the wrong one:

exiftool -overwrite_original -gps:all= photo.jpg

On the test file that removed all 14 GPS tags and left the file 294 bytes smaller. Here is what a exiftool -a -G1 dump still showed afterwards:

[IPTC]          Sub-location   : 7th arrondissement of Paris
[IPTC]          Province-State : Paris
[XMP-iptcCore]  Location       : 7th arrondissement of Paris
[XMP-photoshop] State          : Paris
[ExifIFD]       SerialNumber   : 343037005264

The coordinates are gone and the file still names the arrondissement. Any photo that has been through Lightroom, Capture One, Photo Mechanic or a stock-agency ingest is likely to carry these fields, and most GPS-removal tutorials never mention them.

Remove everything instead:

exiftool -overwrite_original -all= -tagsfromfile @ -icc_profile photo.jpg

That clears the GPS block, the IPTC place fields, the XMP block, the camera and lens serial numbers and the editing history, while keeping the ICC colour profile so the picture still renders correctly. On the test file it produced 7,525,091 bytes from 7,573,756, and the JPEG’s compressed image data hashed identically before and after. Nothing was re-encoded. The full walkthrough of every route, including the ones that do re-encode, is in how to remove EXIF data on Mac.

One thing not to rely on: resizing. sips -Z 2000, the command everyone reaches for before emailing a photo, came out the other side with all 14 GPS tags intact at full precision. Converting to HEIC with sips -s format heic carried all 14 across as well.

This changes, and bad advice here is genuinely dangerous, so every row below carries its evidence and a confidence level. Anything we could not establish from a primary source is marked as not verified rather than guessed.

Two rows deserve calling out. The first is “send it as a document so it keeps the quality.” Photography forums recommend this constantly and almost never mention what it costs. The peer-reviewed comparison is unambiguous: document mode ships the file untouched, checksums and all, which means the coordinates go with it.

The second is Flickr. Its setting is called hide EXIF, and hide is the correct word. The original-size file remains downloadable with full GPS, and sampled originals also carried camera body serial numbers.

The sensible reading of that table is not to memorise it. It is to stop delegating the decision. Strip the file before it leaves your Mac and the platform’s behaviour stops being your problem.

For one photo going to one person, Preview’s Remove Location Info is free, built in, and enough. For one photo going somewhere public, exiftool -all= is free, takes four seconds, and is more thorough than anything with a price tag. Neither case needs an app.

We make Smol, and its strip-metadata operation produced output on our test file that was byte-identical to exiftool -all=, because it bundles exiftool and runs exactly that. What it adds is a drop target, a Finder Quick Action, a watched folder, and keeping your originals in place automatically. Fifty geotagged JPEGs went through it in 5,281 ms with all 15 GPS fields cleared and every image pixel-identical. The same 50 files took exiftool -all= folder/ 465 ms, so if the terminal is not a barrier for you, the terminal is faster and free. It is $29 once, and the step-by-step version is in our help docs.

Smol also cannot solve two of the three storage locations. It does not reach into your Photos library, so the pin stays on the map until you use Hide Location in Photos. And it cannot un-share a photo you already posted.

The larger limitation is worth being blunt about. Removing coordinates stops a file fromstating where it was taken. It does not stop the picture from showing where it was taken. Current image-geolocation models put roughly one in four cue-rich outdoor photos within a kilometre of the right spot from pixels alone, with no metadata at all. That is covered honestly, with the actual published numbers, in why stripping EXIF is no longer enough. If you want to understand the tags themselves before deleting them, start with what EXIF data actually contains. And if the thing you are about to share is a document rather than a photo, compressing a PDF on Mac covers what the presets leave behind.