Remove the location hidden in my photo

When you need this

Every photograph your phone takes can carry the exact spot it was taken, to within a few metres, along with the date, the time and the phone model. That information travels with the file. Post a photograph of something you are selling and you may have published your home address without knowing it.

This matters most when you are selling on Jiji, Tonaton or a Facebook group, sending photographs to somebody you have not met, or posting pictures of children.

How to use it

1. Drop the photographs in. Several at once is fine.
2. Look at what it found. The tool shows you what each file was carrying — often a map reference, a date and a camera model.
3. Save the cleaned copies.

What it does and does not do

• It removes location, date, camera and any editing history, and leaves the picture itself untouched. The file is not re-compressed, so there is no loss of quality at all.
• The way up is preserved. Stripping everything blindly is how photographs end up sideways; the small piece that records orientation is kept deliberately.
• It handles JPG and PNG, which is what phones and screenshots produce.
• It cannot remove what is visible in the picture. A street sign, a gate number or a car plate is part of the image. Use crop, watermark or blur part of a photo for those.

What social media already does, and why it is not enough

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp strip most of this when you post a picture — after it has reached their servers. Sending a photograph as a file or a document, which people do to keep the quality, bypasses that completely and delivers everything. Email attachments keep it all too.

If something goes wrong

• The tool says there is nothing hidden. Then there is nothing to remove. Screenshots and pictures that have already been through WhatsApp are usually clean.
• You want to check a photo somebody sent you. Drop it in and read what it reports, then simply do not save anything.