Strip GPS location from a photo on Mac before sharing

You’re posting a photo from your home or from a friend’s place and you don’t really want random people on the internet to know the address. iPhone and modern camera photos tag every shot with GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres. Most platforms strip it on upload — but not all, and you probably want to control this yourself.

Why this matters

GPS coordinates in EXIF are a real privacy issue:

• Photos posted to forums or personal sites often keep the data.
• “Save image as” downloads preserve EXIF, so anyone who saves your photo gets your location.
• Some metadata viewers extract GPS automatically and even pin it on a map.

Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook strip GPS on upload. Reddit, most CMSes, file-sharing services, and email do not.

The native way: Preview

The simplest GPS-only removal:

1. Open the photo in Preview.
2. Tools → Show Inspector (or press ⌘+I).
3. Click the (i) icon.
4. Click the GPS tab.
5. Click "Remove Location Info".
6. Save the file.

This removes GPS only — other EXIF (camera, timestamp, exposure) stays put.

The native way: Photos app

If the photo is in your Photos library: select it, then Image → Location → Hide Location. You can also do this for multiple photos at once.

The thorough way: exiftool

If you want only GPS gone, exiftool is precise:

exiftool -gps:all= photo.jpg

For a folder:

exiftool -gps:all= -overwrite_original *.jpg

That removes all GPS-related tags and leaves everything else (camera info, timestamps) intact.

The faster way

Melt strips all EXIF — GPS plus everything else — whenever it re-encodes an image. Drag photos in, keep the format the same, ensure “Strip metadata” is on, click Compress. Download Melt.

Strip in Melt

1. Open Melt.
2. Drag the photo(s) in.
3. Confirm "Strip metadata" is enabled.
4. Match the output format to the input if you don't want compression.
5. Click Compress.

Disable GPS at the source

If you don’t want GPS in your photos in the first place:

• iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never.
• Most cameras: Settings menu, look for “Geotagging” or “GPS” and disable it.

That way you never have to remember to strip it later.

What you lose, what you keep

GPS-only removal via Preview or exiftool keeps your timestamps, camera info, and exposure data. Melt’s full strip removes all of it. For sharing, full strip is the safest move; for personal archives, GPS-only removal preserves the data you might want later. The image pixels are unchanged either way.