Photo: Kent Weakley (Shutterstock)
Every time you take a picture with your iPhone, the exact location where it was taken is saved along with the photo. This feature is called geotagging, and it’s useful because your iPhone lets you search for photos by location. It’s less useful when you want to share photos without sharing everything about where they were taken.
Luckily, most social media sites strip location data from photos before they’re uploaded, but it’s a good practice to remove it yourself before sharing photos via another method, as some messaging apps, cloud storage services, and file sharing services (including AirDrop) retain that location data. Here’s how you can remove it quickly.
How to remove location data from your photos before sharing them
Screenshot: Pranay Parab
Open the Photos app on your iPhone and select the pictures you want to share. Hit the share icon in the bottom-left corner, which opens the share sheet on your iPhone.
At the top of the share sheet (in a smaller font below where it says how many photos you’ve selected for sharing), tap Options next to Location Included. Here, under the heading Include, you can turn off the slider for “Location.” If the button next to Location is green, it’s enabled. If it’s grey, it’s disabled. Tap Done to confirm the change and send the photos.
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How to turn off geotagging on all iPhone photos
Screenshot: Pranay Parab
While it only takes a couple seconds to remove location data from photos before sharing them, you can also plug this gap at the source and stop your iPhone from geotagging your photos altogether. If you aren’t ready for that extreme a step, you can also easily stop the phone from recording your precise location each time you snap a photo.
A caveat: If you disable geotagging, you will not be able to search for photos on your device by location; the search function in photos will return no results when you enter the name of a city or a country. The advantage is that you don’t have to worry about exposing your location data accidentally. Disabling precise location tags is probably the better option for most people: It’ll still allow people to see roughly where the photo was taken, but the radius is wide enough to avoid revealing exactly where you took a photo.
To disable geotagging completely, go to Settings > Privacy > System Services > Camera on your iPhone and select “Never.”
To stop your iPhone’s camera from logging your exact location when you take a photo, go to the same settings page (Settings > Privacy > System Services > Camera) and uncheck “Precise Location.”
