Cleaning photos one at a time works right up until the day you forget. Then a picture goes out with your coordinates in it, and no amount of care afterwards takes it back.
There is a version of this that needs no memory. Turn off geotagging in the camera and no future photo records where you were, which means the field you keep having to strip is never written in the first place. It takes about two minutes.
How to turn off geotagging on your phone
Both platforms handle this as an app permission rather than a camera setting, which is why people go looking in the camera app and find nothing.
On iPhone, open Settings, go to Privacy and Security, choose Location Services, find Camera in the app list, and set it to Never. Location Services itself stays on, so maps and everything else carry on working normally.
On Android, most phones put the toggle in the camera app itself — open the camera, open its settings, and look for Save location, Location tags or Store location depending on the manufacturer. You can also revoke it system-wide through Settings, then Apps, then Camera, then Permissions, then Location.
That is the whole job for the built-in camera. Third-party camera and social apps have their own permissions, so check any you use regularly.
iPhone camera location services, in a bit more detail
Apple offers three states for each app: Never, Ask Next Time, and While Using. For the camera, Never is the setting that stops tagging, and Ask Next Time is a trap that prompts once and then re-enables itself.
The Precise Location switch is separate and does something different. Turning it off gives an app a rough area rather than exact coordinates, which is useful for weather and useless here — a photo tagged to within a few hundred metres of your home is still tagged to your neighbourhood. Set the camera to Never rather than fuzzing it.
One consequence worth knowing before you commit: the Places album and the map view in Photos are built from this field. Switch it off and new photos stop appearing there. Existing ones keep their locations, so you lose future map coverage rather than your history.
The Android save location toggle and its variations
Android fragments here, since every manufacturer skins the camera app differently. The wording varies — Save location, Location tags, Geotagging, Store location — and it usually sits under a settings gear or a three-dot menu inside the camera.
Samsung, Google, Xiaomi and OnePlus all place it slightly differently, so the reliable route if you cannot find it is the system permission: Settings, Apps, your camera app, Permissions, Location, Don't allow. That works regardless of the skin and it survives camera app updates that sometimes reset in-app preferences.
Google Photos adds a wrinkle worth knowing. Its sharing settings include an option about whether photo location is included in shared links and albums, which is separate from whether the photo carries the data. Both are worth checking if you share albums.
Why airplane mode does not help
This is the most common misconception in the whole topic, and it is confidently repeated everywhere.
GPS is a receiver. Your phone listens to satellite signals and calculates a position from them, and it sends nothing to do it. Airplane mode disables transmitters — cellular, wifi, Bluetooth — while the GPS receiver keeps working. So a phone in airplane mode with camera location enabled will happily tag photos with accurate coordinates.
What airplane mode does remove is assisted positioning, which uses nearby wifi networks and cell towers to speed up a fix. So the first photo after take-off may take longer to acquire a location or may miss it entirely. That is a delay, not protection.
The same logic applies to being offline generally. No signal does not mean no location. Only the permission stops it, which is the whole reason this page exists.
What about the photos already on your phone?
They keep everything. The setting is forward-looking, so a library of tagged photos stays tagged.
You have three options and they suit different situations. For a single share, both platforms let you exclude location at send time — iOS puts an Options panel at the top of the share sheet, and most Android gallery apps offer a remove-location choice in the share flow. For anything going somewhere public, run it through our metadata remover, which strips the whole block without re-encoding the picture. For working out what is actually in a given photo before deciding, our location checker shows the coordinates in a couple of seconds.
We do not offer bulk processing, and that is deliberate. Running a stripper across an entire library invites overwriting originals you would rather keep, and a family archive is one of the few cases where the location data will genuinely be valuable in twenty years.
What this setting does not cover
Three honest limits, because a setting that felt like a solution and was not would be worse than nothing.
Your phone still knows where you are. You have changed what gets written into image files, not what the operating system or your apps can access. Location history and app permissions are separate settings.
Your photos still show things. A street sign, a house number, a distinctive view, a school uniform. Metadata is the easy half of what a picture gives away, and switching off tagging does nothing about the other half.
Other cameras have their own settings. A dedicated camera with built-in GPS has its own menu, and one that pairs with a phone tags through the companion app. Check each device you actually use.
Two minutes now, or a minute per photo forever
Prevention beats cleanup here more clearly than in most privacy advice, because the cleanup depends on you remembering every single time and the prevention does not.
Turn it off in the camera today. Keep the pre-upload checklist for the photos you already have, and remember that location is only one of the fields a camera writes — our guide to what EXIF data contains covers the serial numbers and timestamps that stay behind after the coordinates are gone.
Take one photo after changing the setting and open it in our metadata reader to confirm the change took. It is a ten-second check and it catches the case where a third-party camera app kept its own permission. Screenshots and PNG exports follow different rules again, which we cover in metadata in PNG, HEIC and screenshot files.