Strip only GPS tags from JPEG — keep date, camera, lens

Why GPS tags carry a different kind of risk than the rest of EXIF

EXIF stores a lot — capture date, camera body, lens, ISO, shutter speed — but those fields describe the equipment and settings used. The GPS IFD is different: it records where. Latitude and longitude are stored to six decimal places, placing the shot within tens of centimetres. Sharing a photo taken at home, school drop-off, or a regular café means that location travels with the file.

At the same time, shoot metadata is legitimately useful. Photographers building portfolios, photojournalists supplying publication records, stock submitters preserving camera-body attribution — all have good reasons to keep capture date, camera, and lens. This tool exists at that intersection: remove the location, keep everything else.

The fundamental contradiction in upload-based GPS strip tools

The reason to strip GPS is that you don’t want a location transmitted to someone else. But uploading a GPS-tagged photo to an online service transmits that location to the operator’s server before any stripping happens. The deletion promise applies after receipt — not to the transfer, the logs, or the backups.

If the service’s terms allow internal use for quality improvement, the original file — GPS intact — may be processed in ways you didn’t agree to explicitly. Seeking privacy protection through a method that requires giving up the protected data first is structurally the wrong approach.

piexifjs editing the GPS IFD without touching the image bytes

The tool uses piexifjs (MIT) to parse and edit the JPEG APP1 segment — the marker where EXIF data lives — entirely in the browser. EXIF is organized into IFDs (Image File Directories): IFD0 holds general image info, ExifIFD holds shooting parameters, and GPS IFD holds location data. The tool removes the GPS IFD wholesale — all 30+ GPS tags including GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude, GPSAltitude, GPSDateStamp, GPSTimeStamp, GPSImgDirection — while leaving IFD0 and ExifIFD unchanged.

Because only the EXIF segment is rewritten and the JPEG DCT data is untouched, quality is bit-for-bit identical to the source. Everything runs in browser memory. Open DevTools Network and process a batch — no requests fire after the page loads.

After stripping: what to check

Stripping the GPS IFD removes EXIF location data, but XMP and IPTC metadata can also carry location independently. This tool only processes EXIF; if an image editing application embedded GPS in XMP or IPTC as well, those copies will remain. For full location removal, use image-exif-strip to clear all metadata, or chain this tool with an XMP-aware editor. For the vast majority of camera-and-phone JPEGs, the GPS IFD is the only location store, and this tool is sufficient.

How the GPS IFD encodes latitude and longitude internally

The GPS IFD (Image File Directory) is a sub-directory inside EXIF defined by EXIF 2.32 (CIPA DC-008), structurally separate from IFD0 (basic image info) and ExifIFD (shooting parameters). It uses the same TIFF (Tag Image File Format) directory layout. GPSLatitude (tag ID 0x0002) and GPSLongitude (0x0004) store coordinates as three RATIONAL values — pairs of 32-bit numerator and 32-bit denominator integers — representing degrees, minutes, and seconds. For example, 35°41′22.2″ N is stored as [(35,1), (41,1), (222,10)].

GPSLatitudeRef (0x0001) and GPSLongitudeRef (0x0003) hold a single ASCII character (N/S or E/W) for hemisphere. Beyond that the IFD defines GPSAltitude (0x0006), GPSAltitudeRef (0x0005, 0 = above sea / 1 = below), GPSTimeStamp (0x0007, UTC time), GPSDateStamp (0x001D), GPSImgDirection (0x0011, where the lens was pointing 0–360°), GPSDestLatitude / GPSDestLongitude (0x0014 / 0x0016, intended destination), and more than 30 tags in total. piexifjs removes the entire IFD in one operation, and the pointer to it (the GPSInfo tag 0x8825 in IFD0) is removed at the same time.

Pairing tag removal with visual location cues

Stripping the GPS IFD doesn’t address the case where location information is visible in the pixels themselves. Street signs, station names, store signage, license plates, and distinctive landmarks (Tokyo Tower, recognisable building logos) are all clues that image-recognition systems — Google Image Search, Apple’s Visual Look Up, generative-AI Vision APIs — can use for reverse geocoding. A reliable pre-share habit combines (a) GPS tag removal, (b) a check for address signs / shop names / license plates in the background, and (c) blurring with image-pixelate where needed.

A frequently missed detail: iOS and Android default camera apps may write location-adjacent hints outside the GPS IFD itself. iPhone HEIC files can include detailed scene info inside the Apple MakerNote block — proprietary fields that may reference nearby Apple Maps landmarks or Significant Locations cues. piexifjs preserves the MakerNote as opaque binary, so this tool does not modify it. For fully anonymised output, use image-exif-strip to clear all EXIF, or run the image through a Canvas re-encode path such as image-resize, which drops every metadata segment — including MakerNote — as a side effect.