Can a Photo Show Where It Was Taken? Location Data, and How to Remove It
Many phone photos quietly record the exact place they were taken. Here is what that hidden data is, how to see it, and how to remove it before you share a picture or upload it to a form.
The hidden data inside a photo
Most cameras and phones write extra information into every photo, called EXIF metadata. It can include the date and time, the camera or phone make and model, the settings used, and -- if location is switched on -- the GPS coordinates of exactly where the photo was taken, often accurate to a few metres.
Not every image has it. A screenshot, or a picture you saved from a website, usually carries no location. But a photo straight from a phone camera very often does, and it travels with the file when you send or upload it.
How to see what a photo is carrying
On Windows, right-click the photo, choose Properties, and open the Details tab -- any GPS latitude and longitude appear there. On a Mac, open it in Preview and choose Tools > Show Inspector, then the information tab. On the phone itself, the photo's info or details view will show a map if the photo is geotagged.
Stop your phone adding location in the first place
On an iPhone, open Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services, tap Camera, and set it to Never. On most Android phones, open the Camera app's settings and turn off the location or geotagging option. New photos then carry no GPS; photos you already took are unchanged.
How our tools remove it (tested October 2026)
Our image converters -- HEIC to JPG, WEBP to JPG, PNG to JPG and JPG to PNG -- keep only the date taken and the camera make and model, and drop GPS location and other hidden data. We confirmed this in our own tests: a photo carrying GPS came out of the converter with the location gone and only the harmless date and camera fields left.
Our JPG to PDF converter now does the same thing as it builds the PDF: it removes the hidden EXIF data, including any GPS location, from each JPEG without changing the picture itself, so the place a photo was taken is not carried into the PDF either. (One aside: taking a screenshot of a photo also drops the original location data, which is why screenshots are safe to share.)
A simple routine before sharing
If you are about to post a photo publicly or send it to someone you don't know well, run it through one of our converters first (or, if you are making a document, let JPG to PDF strip it), then check the file's Properties to confirm no GPS remains. Your upload and the converted file are deleted from our server as soon as your download is ready.