Where was this photo taken?

How to find where a photo was taken

Drag your photos onto the tool or pick them with the button. If the camera or phone saved the location, each photo shows up on the map with its thumbnail. Tap it to see its coordinates, elevation, date and time, camera and, if the phone saved it, the direction it was pointing: that’s the fan next to the thumbnail.

The location is stored inside the photo itself, in its EXIF data: tags the camera writes when it takes the picture, including the GPS latitude and longitude. If a photo doesn’t show up on the map, it doesn’t have them, and there’s no way to tell where it was taken from the file. All that’s left are clues in the picture itself, like a famous building or a sign.

How to add or change a photo’s location

Pick the photo in the list or on the map (or check several with their boxes), search for the place or tap the map, and press “Put it here”. You can also drag the selected photo’s thumbnail to its spot. Then download the photo: it’s the same photo with the new GPS. If there are several, they come together in a ZIP.

It’s handy for photos from cameras without GPS, old scanned photos and locations that came out wrong. Once a photo has a location, Google Photos, Apple Photos, Lightroom and most photo apps place it on their map and let you search by place.

When you change the location, the GPS time and the direction the camera was facing are kept. The elevation and the estimated error are removed, because they belonged to the old point.

How to remove location from a photo

Pick the photo, press “Remove location” and download it. This deletes the coordinates, elevation, direction and GPS time from both the EXIF data and the XMP (the data that apps like Lightroom add). Everything else stays: the date, the camera, the orientation and any place names (city, country) a photo app may have written.

If you want nothing left, press “Remove all metadata”. This also deletes the camera and lens, the date, place names, the details of the app you edited it with and the thumbnail many cameras store, which sometimes shows the whole photo even after you cropped it. Only the orientation stays, so the photo isn’t rotated, and the color profile, so the colors don’t change.

On an iPhone you can also remove it when sharing: tap “Options” at the top and turn off “Location”. And if you never want your phone to save it, turn off location access for the camera in your settings.

Which photos can be edited

JPEG photos (.jpg and .jpeg), the format of almost every camera and many phones: you can view, add, change and remove their location and metadata.

iPhone HEIC and HEIF photos, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF and DNG files can be opened to see where they were taken, but not edited here. In those formats the data sits inside a structure that points to every part of the image, and changing it safely means rebuilding the whole file. To edit a HEIC photo, convert it to JPEG first: on an iPhone, Settings › Camera › Formats › “Most Compatible” makes new photos JPEG.

The image isn’t recompressed: only the photo’s data is rewritten and everything else is copied byte for byte, so there’s no loss of quality and the file is about the same size. Keep the original anyway: the edited photo downloads as a separate copy.

Why social networks strip EXIF data

Facebook, Instagram, X and almost every social network remove the metadata from photos when you upload them, location included. They do it for privacy, because a photo taken at home would tell anyone who downloads it where you live, and because they recompress the image anyway to make it smaller. The risk is real: there have been cases where the coordinates inside a photo posted online revealed where someone who didn’t want to be found was.

WhatsApp and Telegram also remove them when you send a picture as a photo. If you send it as a document or file, it arrives as is, location included. Email, AirDrop and shared cloud folders (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive) usually don’t remove anything: the whole file gets through.

Why a photo has no location

The camera didn’t save it. Most compact cameras and DSLRs have no GPS, and a phone only saves it if the camera app is allowed to use your location. If the phone couldn’t get a signal, the photo may carry empty GPS tags.

It’s a screenshot. A screenshot is a new image, without the data of the photo shown in it.

It went through a social network or a messaging app. Photos you download from Instagram or Facebook, or that reach you on WhatsApp as a photo, no longer have a location.

It was saved by an app that doesn’t copy metadata, like some editors when you “Export for web” or “Save as”.

Your phone removed it before handing it over. On Android, the system photo picker can strip the location before passing the photo to the browser. On an iPhone, picking from Photos can do the same: tap “Options” and turn on “Location” if it’s offered, or save the photo to Files first and open it from there. It doesn’t happen on a computer.

Privacy tips

Before you send a photo as a file, by email or in a shared folder, or post it on a site that keeps the original (forums, blogs, second-hand marketplaces), check whether it has a location and remove it if you don’t want people to know where you took it. That matters most with photos of your home, your kids, your car or something you’re selling.

Time and direction say things too: several photos with times and places map out your routine. And the picture itself can give away where you are: signs, license plates, house numbers or reflections.

There’s nothing to upload here: photos are read and edited in your browser and never reach our server. Only the map tiles are downloaded and, if you search for a place or ask for its name, that text or those coordinates are looked up, never the photo.

How the data is read and written

A JPEG’s EXIF data sits in a segment at the start of the file. Inside it, the GPS block stores latitude and longitude as degrees, minutes and seconds, with the hemisphere letter (N or S, E or W). It can also store the elevation above sea level, the camera’s direction relative to true or magnetic north, the GPS time in UTC and, on iPhones, the estimated error in meters. The tool reads the block as is, without rounding, and converts it to decimal degrees.

When writing, seconds are stored to a ten-thousandth, about 3 mm (1/8 in) on the ground. The new GPS block is added at the end of the data and the old one is overwritten with zeros: nothing else moves, so the maker notes that many cameras store at fixed positions keep working.

A photo’s date comes from the camera’s clock, with no time zone. To convert it to UTC for GPX and KML files, the tool uses the offset many phones save; failing that, the GPS time; and failing that, the time zone at the photo’s location, using the same time zone boundaries as our time zone map.