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Remove Location and Camera Data From Photos Before Posting
Finipix guide · Resize and compress images for the web. Open Finipix
A photo of your new workshop, taken on your phone and put straight on your company page, can carry more than the picture. Inside the file there is often a record of the exact latitude and longitude where it was taken, the date and time to the second, and the phone model. For a shop on a public street that may not matter. For a home office, a photo of your children at a company event, or a picture taken in your living room for a product shot, it tells anyone who downloads the image where you were and when.
This information is called EXIF metadata. It is easy to check and easy to remove, once you know where to look.
What EXIF stores
EXIF is a standard way of writing information into JPEG files (and, in similar forms, into HEIC, TIFF and some other formats). Cameras and phones fill it in automatically. Typical fields:
- Location: GPS latitude, longitude, sometimes altitude and the direction the camera was facing. Phones add this when the camera app is allowed to use location.
- Time: the date and time the photo was taken, and sometimes when it was last edited.
- Device: camera maker and model, lens, and on some devices a serial number or the editing software used.
- Exposure: shutter speed, aperture, ISO, flash. Harmless, but it adds to the file.
- Orientation: a flag that tells software to rotate the picture. This one is useful, and it matters when you remove the rest (see below).
None of this is visible when you look at the picture. That is why it gets forgotten.
Why your own web page is different from social media
Many large social networks and messaging apps re-process photos when you upload them, and in doing so remove some or all of the metadata from the copy other people see. But the behaviour differs between services, between the app and the website, and between "send as photo" and "send as file" options, and it can change with updates. Do not rely on a platform to clean your photos unless its own help pages say so.
Your own page has no such step. When you put images/workshop.jpg in a folder and publish it on GitHub Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages or ordinary web hosting, the server sends that exact file to every visitor, byte for byte. Anyone can right-click the image, save it, and open its properties. If GPS coordinates are inside, they are now public, and search engines that index images can keep a copy.
The same goes for files attached to a page for download, such as a photo gallery in a zip.
How to check a photo for metadata
Check one or two photos before you start, and check again after you process them. It takes a minute.
On Windows
- Right-click the image file in File Explorer and choose Properties.
- Open the Details tab.
- Scroll down. Look for a GPS group with Latitude and Longitude, a Camera group with Camera maker and Camera model, and Date taken under Origin. If the GPS group is missing or empty, the file has no location stored (at least none that Windows reads).
At the bottom of the same tab is a link, Remove Properties and Personal Information, which can create a copy with properties removed. It works for common formats such as JPEG, but it does not handle every format or every field, so check the result in the Details tab afterwards.
On a Mac
- Open the photo in Preview.
- Choose Tools > Show Location Info. If the photo has no location, this command is dimmed.
- In the inspector that opens, click the More Info button and then GPS. A pin on a map shows where the photo was taken.
Menu names can differ slightly between macOS versions. Apple's Preview user guide, under "See where a photo was taken", has the steps for your version.
On the web
Browsers do not show EXIF for an image on a page. To check a photo already published, save it from the page and inspect the saved file as above. Test the live copy, not the file on your desktop, since what matters is what the server sends.
Removing it with Finipix
Finipix is a free image tool from Qorlize that runs in your browser. Images are processed on your own device and never uploaded, and no account is needed. (There is a Korean interface at /ko/.) Removing metadata is not an option you have to find: every image Finipix saves has its EXIF data, including GPS, removed.
- Open Finipix and drag your photos onto the window, or choose them with the file picker.
- Pick a size. Original size keeps the pixel dimensions if all you want is to strip the data. For a web page, Body image (1200px wide) or Hero / banner (1920px wide) also shrinks the file, which you usually want anyway. Images are never enlarged.
- Choose the format: keep original, WebP, JPEG or PNG (AVIF if your browser can encode it), and a quality between 40 and 95. The default of 80 suits most photos.
- Compare the before and after, then download the images one by one or as a ZIP.
- Check one of the downloaded files in Properties > Details or Preview. The GPS group should be gone.
Orientation is handled for you. Stripping EXIF naively can make a phone photo appear sideways, because the "rotate this" flag goes with the rest. Finipix applies the rotation to the pixels first, so the saved image stands the right way up without needing the flag.
Other tools do this too. Many image editors have an export option that leaves out metadata, and the Windows link above works for a quick one-off. Whatever you use, open the output and confirm. "Resize" or "Save for web" in some programs keeps EXIF by default.
Stopping it at the source
Phone cameras generally have a setting to stop tagging photos with location, either inside the camera app's settings or in the phone's privacy and location permissions for the camera app. The exact place differs between phone makers and system versions, so look in the camera and location settings on your own device. Turning it off means new photos have no GPS to remove; it does not change photos you already took.
Some people prefer to leave location on for their own photo library, because it helps with sorting and maps, and strip it only when publishing. Both are fine, as long as cleaning is part of the routine before anything goes on the page.
Two other places location leaks: the picture content itself (street signs, a view from a window) and file names such as IMG_20261118_seoul_home.jpg. Rename files to something plain like workshop.jpg before publishing.
Next
If you are processing photos anyway, size them for the page at the same time: making images smaller for the web covers widths and quality. Then add them to your page with the steps in web image formats and sizes.
Want to try it on your own images? Open Finipix. It runs in your browser and your images stay on your device.