What Is Geotagging, and How Do You Turn It Off?
Geotagging is the term for a device writing your exact location into a file when it's created — most commonly, your phone or camera stamping GPS coordinates into every photo you take. You don't see it happen. There's no banner, no confirmation. The coordinates just get written into the file's EXIF metadata alongside the date, time and camera model, and they travel with the photo wherever it goes next.
How it actually happens
Most phones geotag by default. When location services are turned on for your camera app, the phone reads GPS (or Wi-Fi/cell-tower position when GPS is weak) at the moment you press the shutter and writes it straight into the image file — down to a precision of a few meters. Standalone cameras with GPS chips or a paired phone app do the same thing. It's a genuinely useful feature for organizing a photo library by place, which is exactly why it's on by default. The tradeoff is that the same coordinates go out with the file the moment you send or post it.
Turning it off at the source
The most reliable fix is to stop the tag from being written in the first place:
- iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → set to Never.
- Android: open the Camera app's own settings (varies by manufacturer) and turn off Location tags / Save location; or Settings → Location → App permissions → Camera → Don't allow.
- Standalone cameras: check the menu for a GPS or "location" toggle, or unpair it from any companion phone app that supplies location.
Once it's off, new photos simply won't carry coordinates. It doesn't touch anything you've already shot.
What about photos you already have?
Turning the setting off going forward doesn't help with the photos already sitting on your phone, in old albums, or sent to you by someone else — all of which can still carry a geotag from whenever they were taken. That's where a cleanup pass matters: before you post an old photo, resend one from a friend, or upload something from an archive, it's worth checking what's actually still in the file.
scrub reads a photo locally — nothing uploaded, nothing leaves your device — and shows you exactly what's inside: GPS coordinates, camera model, timestamps, and any other EXIF or XMP data. If there's a geotag, one click strips it losslessly, so the picture itself is untouched but the location is gone. See our guide to removing EXIF and GPS from phone photos for the step-by-step.
The short version
Geotagging is your device quietly writing GPS into every photo by default. Turn it off in your camera settings for new photos, and run older or received photos through scrub before you share them. Get scrub free and check a photo in seconds.