How to remove metadata from iPhone photos

When you share: turn Location off

In the Camera or Photos app, select one or more photos and tap the share button, then tap Options and switch Location off (it then reads "Location Not Included"). Tap Done and share as usual. This is the method in Apple's guide to managing location metadata in Photos.

It is a location control. Apple's guide does not say the date or the camera model are also dropped, so do not assume they are.

For a photo already in your library

Open the photo in Photos, tap the more button, choose Adjust Info, then Adjust Location, then No Location. That follows Apple's guide, which does not state a minimum iOS version, and menu wording has shifted between versions, so if you do not see it, swipe up on the photo or tap the info button and look for an Adjust option next to the location. The change is made to the photo in your library, not to copies you already sent.

Stop new photos recording location

To keep future photos from carrying a location at all, go to Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera and choose Never. The guide to turning off location tags covers Pixel and Samsung phones as well.

To remove everything, not just the location

Apple's steps above deal with location. To remove the date, device and the rest of the EXIF block, open the EXIF remover in Safari and choose your photos. The page shows what each one contains, including whether it has GPS coordinates, before you click Remove metadata.

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.

iPhones save photos as HEIC by default, and the remover will tell you it cannot clean HEIC files losslessly. For those, use the HEIC to JPG converter: the JPG it makes has no metadata unless you tick "Keep EXIF metadata". Converting to JPG is a lossy step (the default quality is 92), while stripping a photo that is already a JPG is not. 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.

Everything happens inside your browser tab, so the photos never leave your device.

Check before you post

Drop the result back on the remover or on the EXIF viewer: it should say "GPS location: no". Apps differ in what they strip when you upload, so cleaning the photo yourself is the dependable option. For the fields involved, see what EXIF data is, and for the other platforms, the location removal guide.

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