How to remove GPS location from a photo

How precise is the location, really?

EXIF stores latitude and longitude as degrees, minutes and seconds with fractional precision. In practice that resolves to a few metres — enough to identify a specific house on a street, not just a neighbourhood. Many phones also store altitude and a compass bearing.

Unsigned shows the coordinates in the breakdown rather than just warning that “location data is present”, because seeing your own address appear tends to be more persuasive than a yellow triangle.

Do social platforms strip it for you?

The large social networks generally do re-encode uploads and drop EXIF in the process. That is a side effect of their image pipeline, not a privacy guarantee, and it does not help you in the cases that matter most:

• Sending the original file over email or a messaging app that preserves it.
• Uploading to a marketplace, forum or classified-ads site.
• Sharing a folder from cloud storage.
• Sending photos to an insurer, landlord or client.

In all of those, the file arrives exactly as it left your device — coordinates included.

Removing the coordinates

Drop the photo into Unsigned. If GPS data is present it appears in red, with the actual coordinates. Click “Strip all & download” and you get a clean copy back — same format, same pixels, no location.

Unsigned then re-reads the file it just produced and reports what it finds. If anything survived, it says so instead of showing a tick. It is a small thing, but “verified clean” should mean verified.

Stopping it at the source

Stripping after the fact works, but not writing the coordinates in the first place is better. On iOS, Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never. On Android, open the Camera app’s settings and turn off location tags or “Save location”.

Both leave your existing library untouched, so photos you have already taken still carry their coordinates.