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Remove your location data from photos with PhotoInfoEraser

Your smartphone photos can have hidden data in them, including location data. PhotoInfoEraser can erase the data on Android phones, so you can share them without worry.

Ed Rhee
Ed Rhee, a freelance writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is an IT veteran turned stay-at-home-dad of two girls. He focuses on Android devices and applications while maintaining a review blog at techdadreview.com.
Ed Rhee
Metadata-removed photo
Image uploaded to Instagram without location data. Ed Rhee/CNET

When you upload photos to Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere on the Internet, you may be sharing more information than you know. Your photos can have hidden data in them, like exact location data. If it's a well-known public location, like Disneyland, you might not mind sharing that, but what if it's your home, or where your kids go to school?

The easiest way to avoid sharing location data on your photos is by turning off geotagging in your Android camera's settings. But maybe you've already taken photos that have location data on them. Or maybe you want to keep a copy of the photo with the location data, but share it without the data. In that case, an Android app called PhotoInfoEraser, can help.

Once you've loaded a photo to PhotoInfoEraser, just tap the Tag Delete button to erase all the metadata from your photo. Immediately afterward, you can choose to share the data-less photo to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.

PhotoInfo Eraser for Android
Screenshot by Ed Rhee/CNET

The original photo is kept in your Android gallery and a copy of the photo, without the metadata, is stored in another location (/mnt/sdcard/Yamagoya/PIEraser).

That's it. Keep in mind that PhotoInfoEraser only works on one photo at a time. If you need to remove metadata from multiple photos, you'll probably want to look for a more robust desktop EXIF editor.