How precise the coordinates actually are
Location is stored as degrees, minutes and seconds in a dedicated GPS directory, typically accurate to around five metres. That resolves to a specific building, and often a specific part of one.
Alongside the coordinates a photo may carry altitude — which distinguishes floors in an apartment block — a GPS timestamp in UTC, a compass direction indicating which way the camera faced, and occasionally a place name written by the camera app.
Read together across several photos, this reconstructs a home address, a workplace, a daily route and a schedule. No individual photo has to be revealing for the set to be.
Where location data actually leaks
Large social platforms usually strip metadata when they re-encode uploads. The leaks happen everywhere else, and they are easy to miss:
- Marketplace listings
- Photos of an item for sale, taken at home, shared with every stranger who views the listing. This is the most common real-world exposure by a wide margin.
- Messaging apps sending files
- Sending a photo “as a file” or “as a document” bypasses the compression path that would otherwise strip metadata, and delivers the original intact.
- Email attachments
- Never processed at all. The file arrives exactly as it left your device.
- Cloud storage links
- Sharing a link serves the original file, metadata included, to anyone who has the link.
- Forums and smaller sites
- Attachment handling varies enormously, and many smaller platforms store and serve uploads unmodified.
Turning geotagging off at the source
Preventing the tag is better than removing it later. On iOS, open Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Location Services, then Camera, and choose Never. On Android, open the Camera app’s own settings and turn off location tags or “Save location”.
Two caveats. This only affects photos taken afterwards — every photo already in your library keeps whatever it recorded. And it removes location from your own photo organisation too, which is genuinely useful for holiday photos and genuinely dangerous for photos of your house.
A reasonable middle ground is to leave geotagging on and clean files before sharing them, which is what this tool is for.
Checking what a photo is carrying
You do not have to take anyone’s word for it. Select a photo above and every embedded field is listed by category before anything is changed — coordinates shown as numbers, plotted on a map, alongside the device, timestamps and authorship data found in the same file.
Nothing is stripped blindly: you choose which categories to remove, and can keep camera information while dropping location, or the reverse.