How to Protect Yourself by Removing Geolocation Data from your Photos

How much does the average person know about the hidden data in the photos you take on your phone?

A highly-unscientific survey of our company staff revealed that almost 60 percent of iPhone users did not know that their GPS location, along with the time and date is captured when they take a picture.

Today’s digital camera prioritizes convenience, with technology that embeds useful data that we expose to the world when we share our images, without any effort from the user. One piece of data added in the EXIF of our pictures is a feature called geolocation.

Geolocation, according to ip2location.com,

is a non-intrusive IP location lookup technology that retrieves geolocation information with no explicit permission required from users.

That’s right, a feature that is enabled by default that tags a physical location to each picture captured on our cell phones. Most likely adding to the confusion is that most popular social media sites remove this information when the file is uploaded.  However sharing pictures via text, email, online forums, or less ethical social media sites keeps this data for anyone to view.

Before you think that geolocating our photos is a bad thing, know that this data enables our software to categorize, search, and label our image library. The Memories, People, and Places albums in our photo galleries are created using this data. Fun, useful data when we control its use.

Protecting Wildlife

As a wildlife photographer, I document endangered and protected species. While performing research, I use my iPhone to photograph dens and nesting areas that I use in my blog posts, but also as a reference so that I can grab the GPS coordinates so I can return to the exact remote location at a later time.

Adding to my hesitation of posting images with geolocation data, I capture a lot of my images using infrared sensors and wireless strobes that I house in waterproof boxes and leave in the field for weeks or months at a time. Obviously, I don’t want my coordinates giving the exact locations of my expensive camera equipment left exposed in the middle of the local swamp.

The wildlife featured in this article are all locally hunted, trapped, or poached and I do my best to protect their locations by removing the geolocation data from the images.

What is EXIF data?

EXIF or metadata is the information that contains information about the camera, settings, lens, time, date, and GPS coordinates. All digital cameras store this information in the image file. From a sample vacation photo’s EXIF data, we can see that Latitude and Longitude data is preserved, along with a map for easy reference, along with the date the photo was captured.

Innocent enough for our own personal photo gallery on our phone, but could be dangerous if you do not know this information is there. This article is about protecting the wildlife I photograph, but the same ideas apply to our personal lives.

Pros

• Used by software for organizing photos
• Searchable
• Great for creating photo catalogs and galleries
• A reference for remembering specific information about the photo

Cons

• Poachers, hunters, bad actors, or the simply curious know where the photo was captured
• Other photographers or researchers know your location
• Reveals location information on where subjects live

Removing EXIF Location Data

Removing the GPS location data from your photos is a simple process that you can do from your phone. I’ll walk through removing the geolocation from an iPhone image, but the process is the same on Android devices.

Disable Camera Geolocation

You can disable the geolocation feature for all new pictures you capture by using the phone’s privacy settings.

1. Go to Settings
2. Select Privacy & Security → Location Services.
3. Select Camera → Never.

Disabling Location Services prevents all future photos from capturing geolocation information.

iPhone/IOS

If you don’t disable Camera Geolocation or want to remove the geolocation from older photos, you can do this from the iPhone’s Photos app.

Open the photo that contains the GPS coordinates. Click the Information button at the bottom section of the image.

Press the Adjust button next to your location information. We are going to ‘Adjust’ the location by removing the data.

Press the No Location button to remove the geolocation data from this photo.

Good job! You just removed the geolocation data from this photo. If the data were still present, it would be displayed above the date in the following image.

Remember that you will have to perform the same steps for each photo to remove the geolocation data.

Android

I did not have access to an Android phone while writing this article, but the process is similar to the previous step.

1. Open the Gallery app
2. Locate the image you wish to remove the geolocation data
3. Select it and click the Share button
4. At the bottom of the photo, click Remove location data

Data Everywhere

In this era of photo sharing and personal safety, knowing that this information is provided with each photo is a step in protecting our data and personal safety. Often times we don’t want to reveal our personal data online, including where we live, where we are, or who we are with.   Knowing that this data exists and more importantly, how to remove this data from your photos is a step in protecting your personal information online.