Where the numbers live
Phones usually write latitude, longitude, and sometimes altitude into an EXIF GPS IFD. Editors may copy the same numbers into XMP. The values are decimal degrees, not a street address. Reverse geocoding (turning a point into “12 Oak Street”) is a separate step a person or a tool might take.
Camera bodies without a GNSS chip typically write no GPS unless a phone or logger added it later.
File GPS, a post pin, and the picture
- File GPS — bytes in the image, usually an EXIF GPS IFD. Open the file you are about to send in Metadata Cleaner.
- Post pin — a place you attach in Instagram, Facebook, or Maps. It is not in the JPEG. Stripping EXIF does not unsay it.
- Pixels — a house number, a shop sign, a window view. No metadata tool removes that.
The tags you can read
The Exif standard defines a GPS block next to the camera tags (CIPA DC-008), and ExifTool documents every tag in it (ExifTool GPS tags). Our photo location viewer prints three of them for a test file: GPS latitude, GPS longitude and GPS altitude (35.0 m in our sample). It does not print every tag in the block, so use ExifTool when you need the full list.
The coordinates are stored as degrees, minutes and seconds with a hemisphere letter. The viewer shows the decimal form to six places, which is formatting and not a statement about accuracy.
Read it, then remove it
- Read: photo location viewer for the location, image metadata viewer for every field it knows.
- Remove: remove location from a photo or the EXIF remover. Both write a new file; neither is a GPS-only edit.
- Compare: verify metadata removed lists the blocks of the two files side by side.
- On iPhone: what an iPhone photo's location reveals.
When iPhone and Android write it
On iPhone, the Camera app follows Location Services and the Camera location permission. If that permission is off, new photos generally do not get coordinates. Old photos already on disk keep whatever they had.
Android camera apps vary by vendor. The same rule of thumb holds: location tagging is a setting, not a law of JPEG. A WhatsApp “document” send and a compressed preview are different files.
What GPS does not tell you
- It does not prove who was holding the camera.
- It does not survive every social recompress — and you should not bet a legal argument on that.
- It is not C2PA, and clearing GPS does not remove an AI label a platform invented from other signals.
Check the original
Download or export is not always the camera original. For a sharing decision, inspect the file you are about to send in Metadata Cleaner. If coordinates are present, make a sharing copy. Related: can a photo reveal location.