How to remove metadata from Android photos

Samsung Gallery: remove location data when sharing

In the Gallery app, long-press a photo to select it, tap any others you want, tap the Share icon and tick Remove Location data, then choose the app to send with. Samsung's guide says the receiving phone then cannot see the location when it swipes up on the photo. Samsung's page covers One UI 3.0 and later, and other regions' pages may differ.

It is a location control for that share. It is not described as removing the date or the phone model, and the photo in your Gallery keeps its location.

Google Photos cannot remove a location your camera recorded

Google Photos has an Edit location option, but Google's help is explicit: you can only change or remove estimated locations and locations you added yourself. If your camera added the location, you cannot update or remove it in Google Photos. That is the usual case for a photo you took, so do not rely on it for that.

Google also notes that your Google Photos edits do not travel with a copy you download and send, which carries whatever the file recorded.

Stop new photos recording location

On a Pixel, open Camera, tap Settings, More settings and turn off Save location. On a Samsung, open the camera settings and turn off Location tags. The guide to turning off location tags has the details and other manufacturers' names for the setting.

Remove everything from a photo

Open the EXIF remover in Chrome or Samsung Internet and choose your photos. The page lists what each contains, including whether it has GPS coordinates, then Remove metadata gives you cleaned copies to download.

In a JPG it removes the EXIF block (GPS position, date and time, camera and phone model, settings and the embedded thumbnail), XMP, IPTC, comments and the other application metadata segments. In PNG and WebP it removes the EXIF, text and XMP chunks. The colour profile is kept by default because it holds no personal data and removing it can shift colours.

The cleaned copy is not re-compressed: the picture data is copied byte for byte and only the metadata blocks are cut out. One exception: with "Apply orientation to sideways photos" ticked (the default), a photo stored sideways with a rotation tag is re-encoded so it still displays upright, and its colour profile is dropped in that case. Untick the box and every photo is copied unchanged, though a sideways one may then display sideways.

Android cameras mostly save JPG, which the remover handles. If yours saves HEIC, convert first with the HEIC to JPG converter. Everything happens inside your browser tab, so the photos never leave your device.

Check before you post

Drop the result on the remover or the EXIF viewer to confirm "GPS location: no", especially if the photo is going somewhere that keeps metadata, such as email or a cloud link. The guide to viewing photo metadata covers the Android and other built-in panels.

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