How to Remove Location Data from Photos Before Sharing on iPhone & iPad
The camera app on the iPhone and iPad collects geographic data of all the photos you take by default (though geotagging photos can be disabled on the camera). This is called geotagging, which essentially lets you know where exactly the photo was captured. Although this is a useful feature to have, considering how easily you can find specific photos from one of your trips by simply heading over to the Places section within the Photos app, it comes at the cost of privacy.
Sure, this might not be a deal-breaker if you’re just going to keep the photos to yourself. However, if you ever share these photos with someone you met on the internet or upload it to your public social media account, you’ll be giving away your location details as well with the shared photo. This is something that privacy conscious individuals may not prefer, but don’t start to get too worried because it’s pretty easy to avoid this.
Are you one of those iOS users looking to stop your device from sharing such information? This article will discuss how you can remove location data from photos before sharing on your iPhone and iPad.
How to Remove Location Data from Photos Before Sharing on iPhone & iPad
The option to remove your location data is located within the Share Sheet. However, this functionality is only available on the most recent iteration of iOS, so make sure your iPhone and iPad is running iOS 13 or later before going ahead with the procedure.
- Head over to the stock “Photos” app from the home screen of your iPhone or iPad, and open the photo that you want to share.
- Now, tap on the “Share” icon at the bottom-left corner of the screen to bring up the Share Sheet.
- Here, tap on “Options” right next to the location as shown in the screenshot below.
- Now, simply use the toggle to disable location details for photo you’re sharing and tap on “Done” to exit the menu.
- As you can see here, it now displays “No Location” for the selected photo. Now, if you share it with anyone via AirDrop or any social networking app, they wouldn’t be able to access the location details even if they tried.
That’s all there is to removing location data from your photos on iPhone & iPad as you share them. Although we were focusing on photos in this topic, this procedure applies to videos as well. You could select as many photos as you want before sharing, and remove the location data for all of them together.
If you don’t want geolocation data to ever be stored on your photos taken with iPhone or iPad, one way to get around this is to disable GPS geotagging of photos taken on iPhone through Settings so that the geographical data isn’t recorded every time you take a picture on your device. You can also go more extreme and disable location services in general though that’s not ideal.
Geotagging photos is useful for personal use but as mentioned before it can come at a privacy cost. For example, it’s easy to view geotagged photos shown on a map on the Mac or iPhone, whether they are your pictures or someone elses, so long as the geotagging data is kept with the photo. Aside from selectively not sharing location data as shown here, the other way around that is to disable location access for the Camera app within Privacy settings on your iPhone or iPad.
Did you remove location data from the photos you share people? What do you think of this photos privacy feature? Let us know your thoughts and opinions in the comments section down below.
