Remove the location from Android photos

Why there is no single Android answer

This is the honest part other pages skip. Android has no one setting for this, and an instruction that names an exact menu will be wrong on most phones that read it. What is consistent is where to look: the camera app controls whether location is recorded, and the gallery app sometimes lets you remove it afterwards. Open your camera, find its settings, and look for whichever of these your manufacturer chose to call it.

• Camera → Settings → “Location tags”, “Save location”, “Geotagging” or “GPS tag”
• Google Photos can drop location from a shared link: Settings → Sharing → “Remove geo location”, which covers links but not the file itself
• Android’s own permission screen - Settings → Apps → your camera → Permissions → Location - stops it at the source whatever the app calls the setting

What the gallery leaves behind

Where a gallery app does offer to remove location, it usually removes exactly that and keeps the rest: the date, the phone model, the lens and exposure, and sometimes the editing software. Messaging apps differ too - some re-compress photos and lose the metadata as a side effect, others send the original file untouched, and you cannot tell by looking. Stripping the file before you send it is the only part of this you control.

What is actually removed

GPS coordinates and altitude, the date and time the photo was taken, the make and model of the device, lens and exposure settings, the serial number some cameras write, and any editing history. For JPG, PNG and WebP these blocks are cut out and the image data is left untouched, so there is no quality loss at all. The colour profile is kept by default so the picture still looks right.