Stop your iPhone camera saving location in photos

The switch, step by step

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap Privacy & Security.
3. Tap Location Services.
4. Scroll down and tap Camera.
5. Choose Never.

That is the setting Apple’s privacy page names for this job. Apple says that if you allow the Camera to use your location, your location is used to tag where photos and videos are taken.

You don’t need to restart anything. The next photo you take has no place stored in it.

The middle setting: approximate location

On the same Camera screen there is a switch called Precise Location. Apple’s location guide says that with it off, an app gets only your approximate location instead of your exact one.

That suits you if you like seeing photos grouped by town on a map but don’t want a pin on your front door. Keep the Camera on While Using the App and turn Precise Location off.

Two things to keep in mind:

• Approximate is still a place. A photo tagged with your part of town, taken at home every evening, still says roughly where you live.
• You can’t tell from the photo which mode was used. Check a new photo’s info after you change the setting, so you know what it records.

Test that it worked

1. Take a photo with the Camera app.
2. Open it in Photos and swipe up, or tap the info button.
3. Look for a map. With the Camera set to Never, there should be none.

While any app uses your location, iOS shows an arrow in the status bar (Apple’s location guide). With the Camera set to Never, opening it shouldn’t bring that arrow up on its own account.

What the switch doesn’t change

The switch works from now on. It doesn’t reach back.

• Photos you already took keep the place they were saved with, years of them in most libraries. Clearing them is a separate job: see how to remove the location from a photo.
• Other camera apps ask for location separately. Each one has its own row under Location Services (Apple’s location guide). Check any camera, scanner or social app that takes pictures.
• What is in the picture stays. A street sign, a house number or a view from your window says where you were with no metadata at all. The cover tool can blank those out before you send a photo.
• The rest of the file stays too: the date, the time and the device. What a photo’s metadata says about you lists all of it.

Should you turn it off?

It depends on what you use the place for.

Keep it on if you like finding old photos on a map, or if you use places to search your library. Then remove the place from the few photos you share, one at a time.

Turn it off if you often send original files, sell things online with photos taken at home, or post pictures soon after you take them. Then you never have to remember to strip anything.

Use approximate location if you want a rough map and less risk.

If you are unsure, check a few recent photos first. Seeing your own home pinned on the map tends to settle it. The photo metadata remover on this site shows what a file carries, in your browser, before you decide.

Where Sealed helps, and where it doesn’t

It helps keep photos that do carry a place out of your library and its map, once you seal them and remove the originals. Photos and videos are sealed the moment they arrive, and afterwards you can remove the originals from Photos if you like. Until you delete them, the originals stay in Photos, outside the vault.

It helps because its own use of location is narrow and stays in the vault. Sealed’s location permission is for break-in alerts (where a failed unlock happened), Location Lock (checking you are at a trusted place) and evidence stacks (where each item was added), and the locations are sealed in your vault and never shared.

It doesn’t change the Camera’s setting or any other app’s: that switch lives in iOS, as above. In iOS you can review or change an app’s location access in Settings, under Privacy & Security, then Location Services.

It doesn’t remove places from photos that stay in your library. For those, use Photos itself or the metadata remover.