Most phones save more than the picture. Tucked inside each photo is a small block of hidden details, often called EXIF data: the phone model, the date and time, the camera settings and, if location was switched on, the exact GPS spot where you took it. Send a photo of your new sofa to a stranger on a selling site and you may be sending your home address with it.
Some apps and social networks remove these details when you upload, but not all of them do, and when you send the original file by email, chat attachment or cloud link, the details usually travel along. Here's how to check a photo and clean it on Windows.
What hidden details a photo can carry
- Location: the latitude and longitude of where the photo was taken, often accurate to a few metres. Put into any map app, it points to a street and a house.
- Date and time: when the picture was taken, which can reveal routines (the school run, the gym, when you're away).
- Camera and phone: the make and model, and sometimes the editing app used afterwards.
- Orientation: a note saying which way up the picture should be shown. Harmless, but it matters when the details are removed, as you'll see below.
None of this is visible when you look at the picture, which is exactly why it's easy to forget. The good news is that it's just as easy to check and remove.
How to check whether a photo has a location
- In File Explorer, right-click the photo and choose Properties.
- Open the Details tab.
- Scroll down. If you see a GPS section with latitude and longitude, the photo records where it was taken.
No GPS section usually means no location is stored, though some programs keep extra details in places this tab doesn't show.
Remove the location with Windows' built-in option
Windows 10 and 11 have a tool for this in the same place:
- Right-click the photo, choose Properties, then the Details tab.
- At the bottom, click Remove Properties and Personal Information.
- Choose one of the two options:
- Create a copy with all possible properties removed makes a cleaned copy and leaves your original untouched. This is the safer choice.
- Remove the following properties from this file changes the original. Tick the GPS entries (or Select All) to remove them.
- Click OK, then check the Details tab of the cleaned file again to make sure the GPS section is gone.
It's free and already on your PC. The catches: it works best with JPG photos, it doesn't support every picture format or every kind of hidden data, and doing it photo by photo gets slow when you have a whole album to share. You can select several photos and open Properties on all of them, but it's worth checking the results afterwards.
Stop your phone from adding location in future
The simplest fix is to stop the location being saved in the first place. Both iPhone and Android camera apps have a setting to turn off location tagging (look for "location" in the camera's settings, or in your phone's privacy settings for the camera app). You lose the handy "photos on a map" view, so some people keep it on and clean only the photos they share. Either way is fine; just make it a choice rather than a surprise.
Clean many photos at once with Santra
Santra is a small Windows app for working with files by dragging them. Its REMOVE INFO tool strips the hidden camera, location (GPS) and date details from JPG and PNG photos (the full details are on the EXIF remover page):
- Select the photos you want to share in File Explorer (Ctrl + A selects everything in a folder).
- Start dragging them, and keep holding the mouse button.
- Tap Alt. Santra's Tools orbit opens under your cursor.
- Drop the photos on REMOVE INFO.
There's no window to fill in. Each photo gets a cleaned copy next to it, named like holiday clean.jpg, and your originals keep their details, so your own library still knows where and when each picture was taken. Share the "clean" copies.
What's good to know:
- No loss of quality. The hidden details are cut out without re-compressing the picture. In our test the camera model, date taken and GPS were all gone from the copy, and the file size barely changed.
- Sideways photos stay upright. Phones often store "this photo is rotated" in the same hidden details. Santra saves rotated JPGs upright so they don't flip on their side once the details are gone.
- JPG and PNG only. For other formats, convert to JPG first.
- Offline. Everything happens on your PC; your photos are never uploaded.
Santra runs on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit). The first 25 conversions or tools are free; after that Santra Pro is a one-time purchase of US$19.
A quick checklist before you share
- Selling something online? Clean the photos first, especially ones taken at home.
- Sending pictures of children? Clean them, and think about what's visible in the background too.
- Posting to a site you're not sure about? Assume it keeps the details, and clean them.
- Check one cleaned photo's Details tab, so you know the method worked.