Remove EXIF data on Android

What Google Photos can and cannot do

From Google’s own help page on understanding and editing your photos’ locations: you can only change or remove estimated locations and locations you added manually. If a location was added by your camera, you cannot edit or remove it in Google Photos. And if your camera added a location and you share the photo through Google Photos, the photo shows the location the camera provided.

So for a camera-tagged photo the fix is to remove the GPS tags from a copy of the file, and send the copy.

Clean a photo in Chrome on Android

1. Open this page in Chrome on your phone. The tool is above; nothing is installed and the photo is not uploaded.
2. Tap the drop area and choose the photo from your gallery or Files.
3. Leave the mode on All metadata, tap the button, and read the After list. The GPS row should be gone.
4. Download the cleaned copy and share that file from the Files app or the notification, not the original from the gallery.

What we tested, and what we did not

We ran the tool in headless Chrome on Linux with an Android Chrome user agent and a 412 by 915 touch screen. We never ran it on a physical Android phone, so the file picker and where the download lands are untested.

The files are synthetic and made for these pages. The result was the same as on the desktop page for EXIF and GPS.

Stop it at the source

Turning off location tagging in your camera app only affects new photos. Cleaning is still needed for the photos you already have.

What stays

• Pixels, so a visible landmark still shows where you were.
• Copies already sent, or backed up with their location.

Questions

Why can’t Google Photos remove my photo’s location?

Google’s help page says you can only change or remove estimated locations and locations you added yourself. If the location was added automatically by your camera, you cannot edit or remove it in Google Photos. The file’s own GPS tags have to be removed from a copy.

Does turning off location in the camera fix my old photos?

No. That setting changes what the camera writes into new photos. Photos you already took still carry the coordinates until you clean a copy.

Does sharing from Google Photos send the location?

Google’s help page says that if your camera added a location and you share the photo on Google Photos, the photo shows the location the camera provided. It also describes per-album and per-link controls for whether location is shared. Sending a cleaned copy avoids relying on those settings.

Did you test this on a real Android phone?

No. We ran the tool in headless Chrome on Linux with an Android Chrome user agent and a 412 by 915 touch screen, using a phone-style JPEG with GPS and a portrait JPEG. The GPS and camera tags were gone in both outputs and the portrait one kept its Orientation tag. A real phone’s file picker and download behaviour can differ.

Will the cleaned photo still be upright?

Yes for JPEG. The tool keeps the Orientation tag and removes the rest of the EXIF block, so a portrait photo does not turn sideways.

Does it work on many photos at once?

One image is free. Pro is a one-time unlock for unlimited images and a single ZIP; see the bulk page.

Related guides

• Remove EXIF and GPS
• Remove AI metadata on iPhone
• View image metadata online
• All metadata-removal guides by file type and device
• Open the Remove AI metadata tool on the homepage if you want the general cleaner.
• Short Instagram upload workflow if you only need the four-step version.