Remove Location Data Before Sharing

This guide is for you if: you are about to share or publish photos and don’t want them to reveal a precise location. A GPS tag on a skyline shot is harmless; on a picture of your dog in the back yard, or your child in your favourite park, it publishes your whereabouts to anyone who downloads the file.

You have two options: remove the location data outright, or replace the precise coordinates with a nearby but less specific position. Either way, work on the copies you intend to share — removal edits the files you have loaded, and you’ll usually want to keep the location data in your own archive.

Option A: Remove the data

1. Add the files and select the ones to clean.
2. Open the Location menu and choose what to remove:
   • Remove GPS Tags — strips the GPS coordinates; the usual choice before posting to social media.
   • Remove All IPTC Location Tags — clears Sub-location, City, Province/State and Country.
   • Remove IPTC and GPS Data entirely — removes all location metadata in one go.
   • Individual entries (Remove Sub-location, Remove City, …) for surgical removal of a single field.
3. Check the result: the GPS and IPTC columns switch to the grey “no data” icon for the cleaned files.

How much should you remove? The GPS coordinates are the truly precise part. The IPTC place names are usually much coarser — a lot of people live in New York City, so leaving the city and country names is mostly harmless and keeps the photos organizable. The sub-location can be the exception: if it names your street, building or another identifiable detail, remove it (or reconsider sharing the photo).

Option B: Keep a vague location instead

Removing GPS data entirely has a real cost: photo software can no longer organize the pictures geographically — Apple Photos in particular loses its location features. The alternative is to keep coordinates that are roughly right but not revealing:

1. Select the photo(s) and click Add Pin next to the GPS coordinates in the sidebar — the map jumps to the precise spot.
2. Use the Drop a new pin tool to place a pin somewhere close by but anonymous — the town centre rather than your street, the park entrance rather than your usual bench.
3. With the files selected, click Apply next to the new pin’s coordinates. The precise position is overwritten with the vague one.

The photos still sort correctly by place, but no longer point at your front door.

In a different situation?

• My photos have no location data at all
• My iPhone photos have GPS, but no place names
• The place names aren’t what I want them to be
• The location in my photos is wrong