How to Remove Location from Photos on Mac

Jul 20, 2017 - 3 Comments

Remove geographic location from Photos on Mac

Many pictures taken with an iPhone, Android phone, or digital camera include location data with the picture, which gives anyone who has the image file the ability to see exactly where the photo was taken. Additionally, the Photos app for Mac allows users to add a location to any picture as well.

If you don’t want a picture to include a physical location, you can easily remove the location from the image by using the Photos app for Mac.

Remove a Location in Photos for Mac

We’re going to demonstrate removing the location of a picture of the Grand Canyon in the Photos app for Mac OS, you can do this with every version of the app.

  1. Open the Photos app for Mac and then open the picture file you want to remove the location for
  2. Click on the (i) info button in the tool bar of Photos to Get Info about the picture
  3. Click on picture info button

  4. Assuming the photo includes an image it will be shown in the info screen here
  5. The location data on a picture in Photos

  6. Now pull down the “Image” menu and go to “Location” and choose “Remove Location”
  7. Remove location from Photos on Mac

  8. Repeat with other pictures as desired

You’ll notice the pictures Info window will no longer show a location once it has been removed. This applies to both how you see it in the Photos app, and also if the picture is shared or exported it will no longer include the location with it.

No more location in picture Photos for Mac

Keep in mind you can always add a new location or change the location of a picture in Photos for Mac too by using this guide, so even if you remove a location, you can re-add it again later if desired.

It’s important to remember that many users like the image location feature since it can help sort pictures by location and track down where something was photographed, as well as allow sorting options based upon location and maps in Photos on Mac and iOS.

Of course, some users may not like locations to be embedded into their pictures in the first place, perhaps for privacy reasons or otherwise. If that sounds like you, you can disable GPS location tagging of photos on iPhone Camera and also use a tool like ImageOptim to batch remove GPS location metadata from images on a Mac with drag and drop simplicity. At the moment, the Photos app for Mac does not include an option to bulk remove location data, so you’d either have to prevent it from being preserved in the first place through the camera settings, or remove it from all pictures with the aforementioned tool, which strips all metadata from images.

Know of any other handy location tricks with Photos for Mac? Let us know in the comments.

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Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Mac OS, Tips & Tricks

3 Comments

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  1. Angela says:

    I followed the instructions but under location I only get two choices, hide location or revert to original location. I just want to remove the location completely. I thought this was meant to work on all versions of Photos :-(

  2. LG says:

    I followed your instructions for removing the GPS location on some photos and it appeared to have worked, as long as I viewed it in iPhotos. Once I moved the photo out of iPhotos and double-checked it by clicking “get info,” the lat and long data was still there. Did I miss something?
    Thanks,
    Lisa

  3. Bernard says:

    What would be useful is the ability to leave the location information intact, but only strip it out when selectively sharing a photo on social services.

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