How to remove EXIF and GPS from phone photos
Say a new parent — call them Alex — loves posting photos of the baby. Every picture is taken at home, and every picture is stamped with the home's exact GPS coordinates. Alex isn't posting an address. The phone is doing it for them, silently, on every shot.
What EXIF is
Every photo your iPhone or Android takes wraps the image in EXIF — a hidden block of data that commonly includes GPS latitude and longitude, the date and time, the phone model, and camera settings. You never see it in the picture, but it travels with the file. Share the photo and you may be sharing where and when it was taken.
Strip it — without uploading your photo
The important part: don't use a website that asks you to upload the picture to remove its location. That hands your image — and its coordinates — to a stranger's server. Do it on your own device.
With scrub, it's three steps and nothing leaves your machine:
- Drop the photo inscrub reads it locally and lists the EXIF, GPS and other data it found.
- Click CleanYou get a copy with all of it removed — losslessly, so the image quality is untouched.
- It confirmsscrub re-checks the result so you know the location is really gone.
Got a whole camera roll to clean out? scrub can check a whole folder at once.
The short version
Your phone tags every photo with where it was taken. Strip EXIF and GPS locally before you post — especially pictures of your family. Get scrub free. (Related: photos you sell online.)