How to remove location from a photo on Mac

iPhone photos record where they were taken: GPS coordinates inside the file, which anyone you send the file to can read. To remove them on a Mac, select the photos in Finder, right-click and choose FileMate › Remove Metadata: a copy of each without the location, dates or camera details is saved next to it. For a single photo, Preview can do it too: Tools › Show Inspector, the GPS tab, Remove Location Info.

The photos stay on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.

Remove the location with FileMate

Select the photos in Finder: one, or all of them.

Right-click and choose FileMate › Remove Metadata.

Each clean copy is saved next to its photo, such as IMG_1234 cleaned.jpg. Orientation and colours stay as they were, and the originals aren’t changed.

To keep the date a photo was taken, turn off Dates and times in FileMate Settings › Remove Metadata. The location still goes.

What a photo records

A photo from an iPhone or a camera carries metadata inside the file, in its EXIF and XMP data: the GPS coordinates where it was taken, often the altitude and direction, the date and time, the phone or camera model and lens, and its settings. Some websites and apps remove it when you upload a photo. A photo sent by email, as a document or in a ZIP archive keeps all of it.

Remove it with Preview

Open the photo in Preview.
Choose Tools › Show Inspector, then the More Info tab.
If the photo has a location, there’s a GPS tab: click Remove Location Info.

Preview changes the photo itself, one photo at a time, and removes only the location: the date and the camera details stay.

Hide it in Photos

For a photo in your Photos library, Image › Location › Hide Location hides it in Photos and when you share from there. When you export with File › Export, turn off Location Information in the export options.

Remove it from many photos with FileMate

Select the photos in Finder and choose FileMate › Remove Metadata. It works on JPEG, PNG, HEIC and TIFF photos, and also on PDFs, Office documents, audio and video. Each copy is checked after it’s made: a copy that still holds something chosen for removal isn’t kept.

Is the photo’s quality reduced?

Usually not. The image data is copied as it is and only the metadata is written again. When a format can’t be copied that way, the photo is saved again at high quality, and the result says so.

What stays?

What the photo needs to show correctly: its orientation, colour profile, resolution and pixel size. Animated and multi-page images aren’t supported yet.