How do you remove the location from photos on a Mac?

In the Photos app with Image > Location > Hide Location, or when sharing with Options, or with Levati, which removes the location while it shrinks a photo. In a measurement on October 28, 2026 on iPhone photos, no result carried any location data after Levati 1.0.1, not even photos whose image data Levati left unchanged.

What location data does an iPhone photo carry?

An iPhone photo with a location carries 14 or 15 GPS fields: latitude, longitude and altitude, the direction the camera faced, speed, the estimated accuracy in meters, the date and usually the time. That is what exiftool showed on October 28, 2026 for JPG photos from iPhone 11 Pro to iPhone 17; none carried location data in XMP or IPTC, such as a city or country.

Whether an iPhone stores the location depends on Location Services for the Camera; with it turned off, photos are taken without a location (Apple Support, Personal Safety, checked October 28, 2026). Some of the photos in the measurement carried no location.

What is left of the location after Levati?

Nothing: after Levati 1.0.1 on October 28, 2026, none of the photos with a location still carried a GPS field, and exiftool found no other location data either. The camera data and the gain map for HDR stayed.

Levati 1.0.0 still left the location in photos missing the GPS time and reported an error; since 1.0.1 it removes it there too.

What about photos Levati does not shrink?

They lose the location too: Levati does not re-encode a JPG below quality 90 unless Limit size applies, but with Position entfernen (remove position) it still removes the location data. In the measurement on October 28, 2026, Levati reported “Ort entfernt, sonst unverändert” (location removed, otherwise unchanged) for these photos; afterwards none carried a GPS field, and the decoded pixels were identical to before for every one.

Position entfernen is on by default in Levati. How much Levati shrinks a photo from quality 90 up is covered in jpegli, MozJPEG or jpegoptim: what does each do for phone photos?; for HEIC, Levati removes the location when converting to JPG, see Does an image get bigger when you convert HEIC to JPG?.

How do you remove the location with macOS itself?

In the Photos app, select the photos and choose Image > Location > Hide Location; when sharing, Options turns the location off for the shared copy, and Location Not Included then appears above the button (Apple Support, Personal Safety, checked October 28, 2026). These ways were not tested in the measurement.

How to make a photo smaller for email as well is covered in How do you make a photo smaller for email on a Mac?.

How was this measured?

The measurement covers 31 JPG photos from iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 13, iPhone 15 and iPhone 17, on October 28, 2026 on a MacBook Pro with M5 Pro running macOS 27.2, each on a working copy; 18 of them carried a location, 2 of those without GPS time.

1. Location data: ExifTool 13.55 with -gps:all and the location fields from XMP and IPTC (city, region, country, sublocation, LocationCreated, LocationShown), before and after Levati.
2. Levati: the function behind the Levati 1.0.1 command-line tool, with Trash and journal in a working folder, Position entfernen on.
3. Photos Levati does not re-encode: the same 18 photos saved at quality 40 with sips, so that Levati estimates them below quality 90; then Levati as above, and the pixels before and after decoded with djpeg and compared byte for byte.

Not measured: HEIC photos, videos, photos from other makers and the ways through the Photos app; the photos and their coordinates are not published.