Remove location data in photos you want to share
You may often want to share a picture without GPS coordinates attached. Glenn Fleishman reports
In the naive early days of smartphone photography on devices with GPS or Wi-Fi-based approximate positioning, Apple and other operating system makers didn’t think about the implication of embedding coordinates in the metadata of the files when it came to sharing them.
Back in 2010, Mythbusters’ and Tested.com’s Adam Savage posted a picture of his car to Twitter, which at the time didn’t scrub geolocation information. Suddenly, people could find out exactly where he lived – and he wasn’t technically unsophisticated.
Twitter and other social networks got savvier after that and removed
coordinates from photos along with additional identifying metadata, reserving geolocation as something that could be chosen and was clearly identified.
But when you share an image taken by the Camera app or other hardware or software that geotags images and videos via iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, you may inadvertently share that location even if you prefer not to. Here’s how to avoid that.
PHOTOS FOR iOS AND iPADOS
Apple added a way to remove location while sharing images and videos two years ago, even though it’s a little hard to spot:
1. Open Photos.
2. Select one or more images and tap the Share button.
3. At the top of the sheet that appears, Apple shows in quite tiny text the number of images selected and ‘Options >’. Tap that target.
4. The Location field is enabled under the Include label. Tap it to disable sending coordinates embedded in the photo or photos. You can also enable All Photos Data to send not just metadata but the entire history of editing and modifications stored for the image, enabling another Photos user to see and modify previous changes.
5. Tap Done and then tap your sharing method.
In iOS/iPadoS 13 and 14, Location under Include is enabled by default; in current beta versions of iOS/iPadOS 15, it’s turned off.