What is EXIF GPS data?
The short story behind the hidden coordinates in your photos — what they are, how they get there, and how to read or remove them.
Definition: EXIF GPS data is location metadata — the latitude and longitude, and often altitude — that a camera or smartphone embeds inside a photo file at the moment the picture is taken, when location services are enabled.
What EXIF actually is
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a standard for storing metadata inside image files like JPEG and TIFF. Alongside the visible picture, EXIF records details such as the camera model, exposure, orientation, timestamp — and, in a dedicated GPS block, the coordinates.
How coordinates are stored
The GPS block keeps latitude and longitude as degrees, minutes, and seconds, plus a reference letter (N/S for latitude, E/W for longitude). For example, 37° 25' 19.07" N, 122° 5' 6.85" W converts to the decimal coordinates 37.421964, -122.085236 that you can paste straight into Google Maps.
Read the EXIF GPS of your own photo
Try it — this reads the GPS block locally and converts it to decimal coordinates:
Privacy: reading vs. removing
Because the location travels inside the file, sharing an original photo can reveal where you live or work. That's why platforms strip EXIF on upload. To remove it yourself before sharing, take a screenshot of the photo, use your phone's "remove location" share option, or re-export without metadata.
Why it can be missing
Not every photo has it — location may have been off, or the metadata was stripped in sharing. See why a photo has no location data.