How and why to remove location info from your photos
Louis, Manager of Customer Catisfaction, doesn’t want you to know where he lives
If you have a website that will show personal photos, you’ll want to remove location information from those photos, especially from any photos taken at your home or other places that you don’t want to share with the public. A client recently asked me to remove location information from all the photos that were to be placed on her website. In truth, I’d never considered that location information was being saved with any photos taken on a smartphone and it wasn’t a request that any other client had made in the past.
My client was taking photos of food she’d made at home, so she didn’t want her home location to be identified. If you’ve had someone take photos of you or your products in your backyard or in your home or studio, remove the locations from those photos too if you want to keep that information private.
This privacy concern extends beyond websites, of course. Keep the tips in this blog post in mind not only for your website, but also for photos you share on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or any other social media channels. Some social media programs remove location information, but they don’t all. To avoid the issue entirely, you can also change your phone settings to never save location information, which is also covered in this blog post.
Checking photos on your computer
For a photo you’ve saved or downloaded to your PC or Mac, you’ll use your computer’s built-in program to view location information if it’s there. Then you can remove the location information and save the image without that information before uploading it to your website.
On a Windows PC
Open the photo in the Windows Photos program.
Right-click and show Properties.
Click "Remove Properties and Personal Information."
Select "Remove the following properties from this file" and then check all the GPS properties to remove: Latitude, Longitude, Altitude.
Save the photo with your changes.
On a Mac
Open the photo in the Preview app.
Select Tools - Show Location Info. If the photo doesn’t have any stored location information, you won’t be able to select this menu command.
If location information is available, navigate to the GPS tab and click Remove Location Info.
Save the photo with your changes.
You can also use Preview’s Tools - Inspector menu command to see the photo’s properties. If the photo shows a GPS tab, the photo has stored location information. You can remove the location info and save the photo as described above.
Excluding location information from all your photos
If you don’t want to have to remember to remove location information only from certain photos, you can change your phone’s settings to permanently exclude location information from any photo you take from your smartphone. This is what I’ve chosen to do recently so I don’t need to remember to check the location information from photos I share in the future.
On an Android phone
Launch the Camera app.
Go to Settings.
Turn off the setting for saving location info.
On an iPhone
Go to Settings - Privacy - Location Services.
Select Camera.
Under "Allow Location Access," select Never.
Home is the place of fun, family, and friends. For many of us, home is also the center of our creative and business lives. In this age of online sharing, remember that you have a choice of how you share not only what you do but where you do it.
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