Remove location from Android photos

Google Photos will not edit what the camera wrote

The help page is blunt about the limit. Google Photos locations states that if your camera saved the coordinates, Photos cannot update them and cannot remove them.

The Remove location item you can see is for a pin Photos guessed from your timeline or one you typed in by hand. It rewrites that guess, not the bytes. Export the photo afterwards, open it on a laptop, and the coordinates are sitting exactly where the camera left them. That gap is why so many people believe a file is clean when it is not.

Check the exported file, not just the map

Gallery location-editing controls vary by phone and app version. Follow the instructions for your device and inspect the exported copy. A missing map in the interface does not by itself prove what metadata is in that file.

Do not assume a location edit removes the date, camera model or every other field. Use Remove EXIF for a separate metadata-removal copy and check the result before sharing.

Where each brand hides the camera switch

Look for the location-tagging setting in your camera app or its location permission in Android. The menu name depends on the brand and version. Turning off capture location affects future photos, so existing files still need a separate check.

Sharing by link is not sharing the file

Google Photos has separate rules for sharing location through its service. A download or export used in another app can behave differently. Inspect the exact copy you will attach; do not infer that a file is clean from a sharing setting alone.

Clean the batch and keep your originals

Put the photos on Remove EXIF. GPS, camera, and date are listed for each one before a single byte changes, and the clean copies arrive with -clean added to the filename, so what sits in your gallery is left alone. Runs take up to 10 photos at 20 MB each.

Files travel over HTTPS, the removal happens on our server instead of inside your browser. Files are deleted automatically after 24 hours.

A JPEG, PNG, or WebP is handed back in its own format, while a HEIC that came off somebody's iPhone comes back as a JPEG. For the field-by-field account of what leaves and what deliberately survives, strip GPS is the page that covers it.

1. Drop the photos on Remove EXIF and read the listed fields.
2. Download the clean copies.
3. Attach the -clean files, not the ones still in the gallery.

Check the copies you plan to share

A gallery may show a location stored by its service rather than a GPS tag from the downloaded file. An empty map alone does not prove that the copy has no location metadata.

On Windows, right-click the downloaded copy, open Properties > Details and look for GPS. For a fuller check, run exiftool -gps:all on that file. Inspect each copy you intend to share: a clean result for one file does not verify the others in the batch.

What the gallery cannot undo

Anything already uploaded to an eBay listing, already sitting in a shared album, or already backed up went out with the coordinates inside it. Clearing the pin today does not reach back into any of those copies.

The visible half is separate. A picture of your porch is still a picture of your porch, and no metadata tool changes that. Framing a listing shot is listing photo size, and the send that keeps every field on purpose is WhatsApp original.

Remove synthetic GPS metadata

Use Remove EXIF on synthetic-gps.jpg. Its EXIF contains the declared test coordinates 0° N, 0° E.

Remove synthetic GPS metadata

File and format	Dimensions / pages	Bytes
Inputsynthetic-gps.jpg	240 × 160 px	32,152
Outputexif.jpg	240 × 160 px	31,990

Input

Output

The original contains EXIF; the output has no EXIF block. The decoded pixels are identical in this JPEG test. Removing metadata does not hide a location or name that is visible in the image itself.

Try Remove EXIF with the sample

Measurements apply to these files and settings, not to every upload. The engine version and processing environment can change the bytes. The public examples stay available; your uploads follow the 24-hour deletion policy.