The GPS coordinates hidden in your photos

A photo of a sofa for sale can carry the coordinates of the living room it is standing in. Here is how to see what yours are carrying, and how to strip it.

Updated 28 August 2026 · 12 min read

A photograph is not only a picture. Alongside the pixels, most cameras write a block of notes about the circumstances of the shot — and on a phone with location services switched on for the camera, those notes usually include where you were standing, to within a few metres.

This is not a secret or a trick. It is a documented part of the JPEG format, added because photographers wanted their settings recorded and mapping apps wanted to sort holiday photos by place. It works exactly as designed. The awkward part is that the design predates the habit of sending original camera files to strangers, and almost nobody is told the data is there.

What is actually in the file

The block is called EXIF — exchangeable image file format — and it sits in a separate segment of the file, ahead of the image data. It is not part of the picture in any visual sense: delete every byte of it and the photograph looks identical. A typical phone photograph carries some or all of the following.

The equipment and the exposure. Camera make and model, the specific lens used — a modern handset has several — then shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length and whether the flash fired.

The time. The moment the shutter was pressed, often with a second field for when the file was digitised, and frequently a time zone offset. That last detail matters more than it looks: an offset does not only say when, it narrows down roughly where in the world you were.

The location. Latitude and longitude, very often altitude too, when the camera had location permission at the moment of capture. Some devices also record which way the camera was pointing.

The software. Whatever last wrote the file, by name and version. Occasionally a device name, an owner name, or an artist and copyright field filled in by a camera's setup wizard years ago and forgotten.

The orientation flag. A single number saying which way up the picture should be displayed. It is the reason a photo can look correct on your phone and arrive sideways for somebody else, a problem of its own covered in why your photo appears sideways.

An embedded preview. A small, complete, separately-encoded copy of the image, kept so file browsers and cameras can show something instantly without decoding the full picture.

That last one is the source of an interesting old bug. In some editing workflows from the earlier years of digital photography, cropping an image rewrote the pixels but did not regenerate the embedded preview, leaving a cropped photo carrying a thumbnail of the uncropped original — a small version of exactly the part you had removed. Mainstream software fixed this long ago; it is not a hazard to expect from current tools. It is worth knowing as a demonstration of the principle: metadata is written by different code than the pixels, and the two can fall out of step.

How coordinates end up as an address

GPS is not stored as the decimal number you would paste into a map. It is stored the way navigators have written position for centuries: degrees, minutes and seconds, each held as a pair of whole numbers, plus a one-letter reference for north or south, east or west. So a photograph does not contain the text 51.501364, -0.141890; it contains something closer to 51 degrees, 30 minutes, 4.91 seconds as three fractions, with the letter N in a field of its own.

That is why the data sits in files for years unnoticed. The conversion, though, is trivial arithmetic — degrees, plus minutes over sixty, plus seconds over three thousand six hundred, with the sign flipped for south and west. Any tool that reads EXIF does it in a line or two of code, and the result drops straight into a mapping service and returns a street address. Six decimal places, the precision this site displays, is finer than consumer GPS is accurate, but it leaves no doubt which building you were in.

What “social media strips EXIF” actually means

This is the point most articles get half right, and the half they miss is the important one. Major platforms generally do remove EXIF from the copy of your image they serve back to other users. Save a photo from a large social network and you will usually find the metadata gone. That is real, deliberate, and worth knowing.

But stripping it from the public copy is not the same as the data never having existed. When you uploaded, you sent the original file — coordinates, timestamps, device name and all. The platform received it. What happens to it afterwards is their policy and their retention schedule, not yours. Removing metadata from what other users can download says nothing whatever about what the company itself keeps.

So the accurate statement is narrow: platform stripping protects you from other users of that platform. It does not protect you from the platform. Those are different things and they deserve different responses.

And a great deal of sharing never touches a platform that strips anything at all. Email attachments normally arrive byte-for-byte as they were sent. Cloud storage links usually hand over the original file, because that is the entire point of cloud storage. Messaging apps that compress an image for a chat often do strip it, but the same apps offer to send “as a file” or “as a document” — and that path deliberately preserves the original. Smaller marketplaces, forums, community sites, contact forms and the long tail of sites that simply keep whatever they were given will keep what you gave them.

Nor can you reliably tell which is which from the outside. Behaviour varies between services, between the web version and the app, between one upload path and another, and changes without announcement. Keeping a mental list of the safe routes is a losing exercise — which leaves one rule that holds up: if you do not want a file to carry location data, remove it before the file leaves your device. That is the single moment you control completely. Everything after it is somebody else's policy.

Check, rather than assume

People guess in both directions. Some assume every photo they own is a map pin; others assume the phone must be handling it. The answer takes seconds to obtain. EXIF is overwhelmingly a JPEG phenomenon; PNG files rarely carry it and screenshots almost never do, since no camera and no location were involved. Photos that have already passed through a compressing chat app or a social platform frequently come back clean, and a photo taken with location permission denied will have every other field but no GPS block. An empty result is common, not a sign that something failed.

One caution applies to the checking method itself. Uploading a photograph to an unknown website to learn whether it holds your home address is an awkward manoeuvre: you have handed the file, and the coordinates, to the site you consulted. A tool that reads the file locally avoids that, and the difference between the two designs is set out in are online image tools safe.

When this genuinely warrants attention

Not every photograph needs cleaning, and treating all of them as equally sensitive is a good way to abandon the habit within a week. A few situations earn it.

Selling something from home. The classic case: the photographs are almost always taken where the item lives, and smaller selling sites are the least likely to strip anything.

Listing a property or a rental. The advertised address is public anyway, but photographs taken during a viewing can carry a different address than the one advertised, and pictures of an occupied home reveal the occupant's.

Photographs of children. Pictures taken at home, at a school, at a regular activity. The concern is not any single image; it is that a set of them with coordinates and timestamps describes a routine — this place on weekday mornings, that place on Saturdays.

Anything posted from a private address. A plant, a recipe, a repair in progress, a pet on a sofa. Nobody thinks about these, precisely because the subject is innocuous.

Sensitive professional contexts. Journalism, legal and medical work, support services — any situation where the location of a meeting or a person is itself confidential. Here the timestamp can matter as much as the coordinates.

Outside those, the honest answer is often that it does not matter. A landscape posted from holiday gives away a place you have already told everyone you visited.

What you lose by removing it

Stripping metadata is not free, and pretending otherwise leads people to clean their whole library and regret it. The commonest casualty is chronological sorting. Some photo software sorts by the capture date recorded in EXIF rather than the file's modification date. Remove it and a batch of holiday photos rearranges itself into the order you happened to process them, which is no order at all. You also lose the camera settings, of no interest until the day you want to know how you got a particular shot and find nothing to consult. And you lose automatic map albums: the feature that groups photos by place runs entirely on the coordinates you just deleted.

There is a second, smaller cost: removing metadata from a JPEG means re-saving it, and re-saving a lossy file always spends a little quality. At a high setting the loss is invisible, but it is one more reason not to do it to your only copy.

One useful side effect: because the block includes that embedded preview, removing it shaves a few kilobytes off the file. Not enough to rescue an oversized image — the real causes are covered in why your image file is so large — but occasionally enough to slip under a tight upload limit.

Stopping it from being written at all

Removing data afterwards is a repair. Not recording it is a fix, and every current phone can do it — though the wording differs enough between devices and versions that quoting a menu path with confidence would be misleading. Look for it by function instead.

On iPhone and iPad, camera location is a permission like any other. In the privacy and location settings, find the camera in the list of apps requesting location and set it to never; the camera works exactly as before and simply stops writing coordinates. Separately, the share sheet offers per-photo options for sending a single picture without its location.

On Android, two independent controls exist and both are worth setting. The camera app usually has its own toggle, named something like location tags, GPS tag or store location. Underneath it, the system permission granting that app location access can be revoked outright — the more reliable of the two, since it does not depend on the app honouring its own switch.

On a dedicated camera, GPS is usually either absent or something you deliberately enabled through a paired phone. If it is on, the same menu turns it off.

Two things this does not solve. It applies only to photos taken from now on; existing pictures keep what was written when they were taken. And it covers only location — date, camera, lens, exposure and software are still recorded, because they are not tied to a permission.

Nor is any of this anonymisation. A street sign, a house number, a distinctive view from a window, a delivery label on a box, a school uniform — these are in the picture, and no amount of cleaning the file touches them. Removing EXIF closes one channel completely. Looking at the photograph properly before posting it closes the other.

Common questions

Does removing EXIF change how the photo looks? No — the metadata sits separately from the pixels. The only visible change comes from the re-save, which at a high quality setting is not detectable. One exception: if the original relied on an orientation flag to display the right way up, re-saving bakes the rotation into the pixels instead, which is what you want.

Can the data be recovered from a stripped copy? No. The clean file is written from the pixels alone, so there is nothing to recover. This is exactly why you keep the original.

My photo showed no metadata at all. Did something go wrong? Almost certainly not. Screenshots have none, PNG files rarely carry any, and files that have passed through a social platform or a compressing chat app usually come back clean.

Do HEIC photos from an iPhone contain the same thing? Yes, including GPS. Converting one to JPG strips it as a side effect, since the new file is written from the pixels alone.

If I crop out the part of the photo that shows my street, is that enough? No. Cropping changes pixels; the coordinates live in a different part of the file and survive untouched. Both need addressing separately.

Does a screenshot of a photo remove the location? Yes, as a side effect: a screenshot is a fresh capture of the screen and carries none of the original's EXIF. It is a crude method that costs image quality, but the reasoning is sound — any process that rebuilds an image from its pixels leaves the metadata behind.