How to remove location data from iPhone photos
Every photo you take with your iPhone records your exact location. The GPS coordinates are embedded in the image file as EXIF metadata — invisible when you look at the photo, but readable by anyone who receives the file. If you share photos by AirDrop, email, or messaging apps that preserve original files, the location goes with them.
Social media apps like Instagram and Facebook strip this data when you upload, but that does not help when you send photos directly. Here is how to remove location data before sharing, and how to stop your iPhone from recording it in the first place.
Option 1: Remove location when sharing (iOS 15 and later)
Apple added a built-in way to strip location from photos at the moment you share them. It works in the share sheet, which means it applies to AirDrop, email, Messages, and any other app that uses the standard iOS sharing interface.
Open the Photos app and select the photo (or photos) you want to share. Tap the share button. At the top of the share sheet, you will see the photo preview and a small "Options" link. Tap it. Under "Include," you will see a toggle labelled "Location." Turn it off. Tap Done, then proceed with sharing as normal.
The location data is removed from the copy that gets shared. Your original photo keeps its location — it is only the outgoing copy that gets cleaned. This is the easiest method and the one Apple designed for exactly this purpose.
Option 2: Remove location from a photo permanently
If you want to strip the location from the photo itself — not just from a shared copy — you can do it in the Photos app.
Open the photo, tap the info button (the "i" icon), and you will see a map showing where the photo was taken. Tap "Adjust" next to the location, then tap "No Location." The GPS coordinates are removed from the file permanently. You can undo this by going back and setting a location manually, but the original precise coordinates are gone.
This works on individual photos. If you need to remove location from many photos at once, select them all in the Photos app, tap the share button, tap Options, and turn off Location before sharing to yourself (for example, by saving to Files). Alternatively, use a Mac — the Photos app on macOS lets you select hundreds of images and remove location data in batch through the Image menu.
Option 3: Stop recording location in the first place
If you rarely need location on your photos and do not want to think about it every time you share, you can turn off location access for the Camera app entirely.
Go to Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services. Scroll down to Camera and set it to "Never." From that point on, no photo you take with the Camera app will include GPS coordinates.
The trade-off is that you lose the ability to search photos by location in the Photos app, and the Places album will stop populating with new photos. If you use the map view in Photos to find pictures from a specific trip, this will affect that workflow. For most people who primarily share photos and do not browse by location, it is a sensible default.
Option 4: Use a browser-based tool
If you have already transferred photos to a computer — or if you want to check exactly what metadata a photo contains before deciding what to remove — a browser-based tool gives you more visibility.
MetaScrub's photo metadata viewer lets you drop a photo and see every EXIF field: GPS coordinates, camera model, timestamps, and more. The file is processed entirely in your browser, so it never gets uploaded. You can then download a clean copy with the metadata stripped.
This approach is especially useful when you receive a photo from someone else and want to see what data it carries before forwarding it.
What about screenshots?
Screenshots taken on an iPhone do not include GPS coordinates. The EXIF data on a screenshot contains the date, time, and device model, but no location. If you need to share an image and want zero location risk, taking a screenshot of the photo is a crude but effective workaround — though it reduces image quality and crops to your screen size.
What about HEIC vs JPG?
Both formats carry EXIF metadata in the same way. Switching your iPhone's capture format from HEIC to JPG (under Settings, Camera, Formats) does not remove or reduce location data. The GPS coordinates are stored identically in both formats. If you need to convert HEIC photos to JPG for compatibility, a browser-based HEIC converter can handle the format change while you manage the metadata separately.