A Mac app that strips GPS location from photos before you share them

Every phone and a growing number of cameras record where a photo was taken, to within a few metres, and the coordinates stay in the file. Share it and they go with it: the photo of the new kitchen carries the house, the fledgling on the nest carries the nest, the client’s site visit carries the client’s address. Some platforms strip the location on upload and some do not, and an email, a message, a shared folder or your own website never do. The safe assumption is that whatever you send carries exactly what the file carries.

Archyv is a Mac app that makes a share-ready copy of a whole folder with the coordinates gone and everything else kept. Its Image Conversion process has a metadata option that strips only the GPS, a built-in Social Media template that applies it, and a read-only review window to confirm what a file carries before it leaves. Below: what location data a photo actually holds, whether to strip a copy or edit the file itself, making the copies, what stays and what goes, editing the location fields in place, and checking the result — and, at the end, where Photos, Preview and ExifTool stop if you would rather not install anything.

What location data a photo carries

Two different things get called the location. The GPS coordinates are numbers — latitude, longitude, usually altitude — written by the phone or camera at the moment of capture into the EXIF block, without anyone typing them. The place names — a city, a region, a country — are text fields in the IPTC and XMP blocks, typed by a person or filled in by a catalogue app, and they are only as precise as whoever entered them.

The distinction matters because they are handled separately. Stripping the GPS removes the coordinates; a caption that says Sooke Harbour or a City field reading Victoria is a separate decision, and usually a harmless one. Archyv keeps the two apart in its own review window, where Quick View shows GPS Coordinates and Location as two different fields.

Decide: a stripped copy, or the file itself

If the photo is leaving — for a post, a client, a newsletter, a listing — make a copy without the coordinates and keep the original as it is. The original’s location is useful to you: it is how you find the shot again, and how a wildlife record or a site survey stays verifiable. Image Conversion writes new files and never touches the source, which makes it the right tool for exactly this.

If the location in the file itself is wrong, or the place-name fields need correcting across a set, that is a job for the Metadata Editor, which works on the file in place — covered further down.

Make share-ready copies with Strip GPS Only

Select the files and choose Image Conversion from the process bar. It asks for a destination folder first, because it writes new files; choose one and click Select Folder. Then pick a template.

The built-in Social Media template is the ready-made answer: JPEG at 90% quality, 1080 pixels, GPS stripped — sized for platforms that resize anyway and with the coordinates gone. For a larger copy, duplicate Web Optimized (JPEG 85%, 2048 pixels, sRGB) and set its Metadata Handling to Strip GPS Only; the built-in templates are locked, so a duplicate is how you get an editable one. Give it a name that says what it is for, and from then on it is one choice in the menu.

Click Start. The log reports each file’s conversion status, and the finished files land in the destination, named from the template’s pattern — {original} keeps the source name, and literal text such as {original}_share labels the copies. Video files in the selection are skipped automatically with a note in the log.

A text watermark can go on the same copies — {copyright}, {artist} and {year} are accepted as variables — so a photo that leaves without its location still leaves with a visible credit.

What stays and what goes

The template’s Metadata Handling menu offers six settings, and two of them are the ones to understand before anything goes public.

Strip GPS Only removes the location data and keeps the rest of the metadata. The copyright and caption travel with the file; the coordinates do not. It is the setting for images posted publicly — the credit stays, the shooting location goes.

Strip All removes everything and maximises privacy — but everything includes your name, your copyright line and the caption, so a file that turns up somewhere it should not can no longer be traced back to you. It suits a preview where the camera details should not travel either, and nothing else.

The other four — Preserve All, Keep EXIF Only, Keep IPTC/XMP Only and Strip User Data — cover the remaining cases; Preserve All is the setting for archival copies that should keep their full record. The Conversion Templates reference describes each.

Edit the location fields in the file itself

When the original is the thing to change — coordinates that are wrong, place names to correct or standardise across a collection — the Metadata Editor works on the file in place. Select the files, choose Metadata Editor from the process bar, and select the Location category to filter the field list to its fields. In Batch mode the same field edit applies across every selected file, and the action is explicit — Add, Replace or Clear — so removing the coordinates from every file is the Clear action on the coordinate fields, not a blank typed into them; in Individual mode you work through them one at a time with Previous and Next. Coordinates are validated as you type, the value is committed with Apply, and Start writes the changes through ExifTool. It supports images including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIC and RAW formats such as CR3, and video in MP4, MOV and M4V.

Because this route rewrites the file rather than a copy, use the two safeguards: Simulation Mode, in General Settings, reports what the process would do in the log without changing anything, and the automatic backup setting copies each file before it is changed.

Check it before you send it

Do not take a stripped file on trust. Select the converted copies and open Metadata Review — a read-only window that never modifies a file. Its Quick View tab gathers GPS Coordinates and Location beside Photographer, Capture Date and Keywords; the EXIF tab holds the camera settings and the IPTC tab the descriptive fields such as copyright and caption. Move through the batch with the arrow keys. A copy that should have no coordinates and does have them has come from the wrong template, and you find that out here rather than after it is posted.

Where Photos, Preview and ExifTool stop

If you would rather try the built-in tools first, here is what each one covers.

Apple Photos handles this well for its own library: the export sheet and the share sheet each have a location option, and switching it off produces a copy without the coordinates. That is the right tool if your photos live in Photos. If they live in folders, importing them into a library to export them back out is the long way round, and there is no saved recipe for the size and quality the copy should have.

Preview shows the GPS position on a map in its Inspector and removes nothing. Finder does not show it at all.

ExifTool, the free command-line tool, strips the coordinates in place, with no copy and no preview:

exiftool -gps:all= -overwrite_original *.jpg

That removes the EXIF GPS block from every JPEG in the folder and overwrites the originals; an XMP copy of the location, where one exists, needs its own tag named in the same command. It is the fastest route when the files are already where they should be and you are sure — and the least forgiving when you are not. The ExifTool GUI guide covers the trade-off between the command and a front end over the same engine.

Next: the Image Conversion reference covers every format, sizing mode and metadata option, Conversion Templates covers building a share template of your own, and Metadata Review covers the check. For a full web-delivery recipe — size, quality and colour as well as metadata — see converting RAW files to web-ready JPEGs.