What's hidden inside a photo
Most photos carry extra details called metadata (often "EXIF"). A phone picture can include the camera or phone model, the date and time it was taken and, if location was switched on, the exact GPS spot. That's handy in your own photo library, but when you share a picture of your home, your child's school or your new car, the location goes with it.
How to remove photo metadata with Santra
- Find the photos in File Explorer. Select one, or several (Ctrl + A selects everything in a folder).
- Start dragging, and keep holding the mouse button.
- Tap Alt. Santra's Tools orbit opens under your cursor.
- Drop the photos on Remove info.
That's it: there's no window to fill in. Each photo gets a clean copy next to it, called name clean.jpg (or .png). Share the clean copy. The original keeps its details, so your own library still knows where and when each picture was taken.
What gets removed, and what doesn't change
- Removed: camera details, the GPS location and the date. In our test, the camera model, the date taken and the GPS data were all gone from the clean copy.
- Not changed: the picture itself. Santra takes the hidden sections out without re-compressing the image, so there's no loss of quality. In our test the file size barely changed.
- Rotated photos stay upright. Phones often store "turn this picture" as metadata. Santra saves those JPGs already turned the right way, so they don't end up on their side.
Remove info works on JPG and PNG. For other formats, convert to JPG first, then remove the info from the JPG. Folders themselves can't be dropped, so select the files inside instead.
How to check whether a photo has a location
Right-click the photo in File Explorer, choose Properties and open the Details tab. Scroll down: if there's a GPS section with latitude and longitude, the location is stored in the file. Do the same with the clean copy from Santra and that section is gone.
The built-in Windows way, and its limits
Windows has its own option: right-click a photo, choose Properties, open the Details tab and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. You can make a copy with all possible properties removed, or tick which ones to remove. It's free and already on your PC, and for a few JPGs it does the job. The limits: it's several clicks per batch, it only removes the properties Windows knows how to list, and it isn't available for every file type.
Other ways to protect your location
- Switch off location in your phone's camera if you never want it saved in the first place.
- Social networks: many large sites remove location data from photos you post, but not every service does, and sending a photo "as a file" or "as a document" in a chat app usually keeps everything. A clean copy is the safe bet.
- Online metadata removers: they work, but you upload the very photo you're trying to keep private.
For a step-by-step guide to checking a photo for location first, read how to remove location from photos on Windows. Santra works only on Windows 10 and 11.