How do I remove GPS and EXIF location from photos on iPhone?

Every photo your iPhone takes carries an EXIF block — fields written alongside the pixels:

• GPS latitude and longitude, frequently accurate to a few metres. Often altitude and compass heading too.
• The exact timestamp, to the second, with time zone.
• Device make and model — "Apple iPhone 15 Pro" — and the lens used.
• Camera settings: shutter, aperture, ISO, focal length. Sometimes software version and edit history.

Set the technical fields aside and look at the first one. A photo taken in your living room contains your home address, to the metre, as a number, in the file. A photo of your child in the garden says where your child lives. A photo of something you are selling tells the buyer where to come and get it. None of it is visible in the picture, and all of it travels with the file.

This is not hypothetical. It is the most common way people accidentally publish where they live.

The fastest fix, and the one most people have never noticed.

Select the photo in Photos and tap Share. At the top of the Share Sheet, under the thumbnail, a line reads 1 Photo Selected with a blue Options button beside it. Tap it, turn Location off, tap Done, then share as normal. The file that goes out has no GPS in it.

The catches, stated honestly:

• It applies to that share only — not a permanent setting, and you have to remember it every time. (iOS tends to remember the toggle between shares, but check rather than rely on it.)
• It removes the location, not everything: capture time, camera model and exposure settings typically still go along for the ride.
• It does nothing for files sent outside the Share Sheet — anything already exported to Files, attached from Files, or synced to a cloud folder.

For "I am about to text this to someone", it is sufficient, and it is free.

If you want the location gone from the photo in your library, rather than just from one share:

Open the photo, swipe up (or tap the info button), and you will see a map with the location. Tap Adjust, then Remove Location. The photo no longer has coordinates, and every future share of it carries none.

You can do this in bulk: in the Photos grid tap Select, choose as many photos as you like, tap the ... menu, and use the Location option to remove it from all of them at once.

Same caveat as before: this removes the location. The rest of the EXIF stays.

The cleanest option, and worth considering seriously: Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera > Never.

From then on your photos have no GPS because none was ever written. Nothing to strip, nothing to forget, nothing to leak.

What you give up: Photos can no longer sort your library by place, the Places album stops being useful, and "show me photos from Rome" stops working. Some people would miss that a great deal and some have never used it once. It is your call, and it costs nothing to make.

The built-in tools handle location, in Photos, at share time. They do not cover:

• Everything else in the EXIF — device model, serial numbers, timestamps, software version, edit history.
• Files that are not in Photos. Images in Files, images someone sent you, images you downloaded, scanned documents, screenshots of things.
• Batch work on dozens of files at once, outside the Photos app.
• Conversion at the same time, which is usually why you are here — the form wants a JPG and you would rather it did not know where you live.

Re-encoding the image writes a fresh file from the pixels alone. Nothing carries over unless the tool deliberately copies it. That is the only approach that removes all of it, and it is what a converter with metadata stripping does.

Convexy strips EXIF and GPS by default on every image conversion — it is a toggle in Settings ("Strip metadata by default"), on out of the box, and you can turn it off if you actually want the metadata preserved.