Make Sure Your Phone’s Photos Aren’t Revealing Your Location

Make Sure Your Phone’s Photos Aren’t Revealing Your Location

Your photos might be revealing your location without you realising it. Here’s how to make sure your phone doesn’t log the location of each photo you take.

Picture: Moyan Brenn/Flickr

When you take a photo, your phone logs a lot of data about it — including the date it was taken, what kind of camera you’re using, and the location of the photo. Since this information is very easy to uncover, you probably want to make sure your phone isn’t logging the location of each photo you take — especially if you share those photos on public social networks. You can always remove that data later on, but here’s how prevent your phone from logging that information in the first place. (Hat-tip to Ghacks for the inspiration on this post).

Note: These settings have been around for a while, so many of you may already know this, but most of your friends and family may not. So if you already have these disabled, be sure to send the instructions along!

Android Users:

Make Sure Your Phone’s Photos Aren’t Revealing Your Location

In Android, you’ll find the necessary settings in your Camera app. Your steps might differ slightly depending on which app you use. Here are the instructions for Google Camera:

  1. Open up the camera app and head to its settings.
  2. Switch off the setting entitled “Save location”. Photos taken from now on will not include the location they were taken.

Again, the setting may be different in your camera app, and you’ll have to repeat this process for every camera app that you use (if you use more than one).

iPhone Users:

Make Sure Your Phone’s Photos Aren’t Revealing Your Location

For iOS users, you’ll need to adjust which apps have access to your location from iOS’ Settings. Here’s how:

  1. Go into the iPhone settings.
  2. Go to Privacy
  3. Tap Location Services
  4. If you have your general Location Services on, you can choose which apps use the services by scrolling down. Toggle off your camera app(s) to disable location sharing through them.

That’s all — your photos should now be free of any location data. If you ever want to share a photo’s location on social networks, you usually have the option to tag a location anyway — so you don’t lose too much by turning this feature off.


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