Safety
A photo from a sensitive place: what gives it away
Where a photo was taken can be read in two places: in its file, which a phone fills with the location, the time and its own details, and in the picture, where a sign or a skyline can be enough. For a shelter, a home, a workplace or anywhere that should stay unknown, check both before you send it.
Check a photo Try a sample photo
1 What the file says
- The location, often to within a few metres, and sometimes the direction the camera faced.
- The time, to the second, with the time zone.
- The phone or camera: its make and model, and from many cameras a serial number that is the same in every photo — enough to tell that two photos came from one camera.
- A small copy of the picture: some editors leave it as it was, so a cropped photo can still carry what was cropped off.
Open the photo in hexscope: it reads the file in your browser and shows each of these, with the location on a map drawn in the page, not fetched from a map service.
2 Remove it
Press Remove it — save a clean copy. The copy has no location, camera, time or small copy, and the picture itself is copied byte for byte. Then press Open the clean copy and check that nothing is left. For many photos at once, choose them together or drop a folder on the page.
3 What the picture shows
No tool removes what is in the picture. Look at it as a stranger would:
- street names, shop signs, house numbers and number plates;
- landmarks, the skyline, a mountain, a bridge, a distinctive building;
- the sun and the shadows, which tell the direction and the time of day;
- reflections in windows, glasses and screens;
- in a video, also what can be heard: names, announcements, sirens, a language.
To hide part of it, use Black out part of the picture: it saves a new picture with the black in its pixels. Blurring and pixelation can sometimes be undone; solid black cannot.
4 How you send it
Messengers and social networks usually recompress a photo sent as a photo and drop its location on the way. A photo sent as a file or a document, by email or through a cloud link keeps all of it. Rules change and apps differ, so check the file you are about to send rather than the app's promise.
When a photo is posted can say as much as where: posting while you are still there tells everyone where you are now. Posting later is safer.
5 Stop the phone writing it
- iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never. When you share, tap Options at the top and turn off Location.
- Android: in the camera app's settings, turn off the option to save or tag the location. Its name depends on the phone's maker.
Photos already taken keep their location: only new ones are affected.
Check a photo now Your files never leave your browser.