Does Photos always include your location?

H1290 wrote: … I don’t quite understand how location ties in with photos. So let’s say I email myself a photo, then grab it from my email on a pc and send it in some chat room, can people use that photo to find out my location?

That's a good question-- Apple's email strips personal data, including location, from images. Here's the metadata for a picture I sent to myself using Apple Mail-- the sent and the received:

The "sent" metadata is way longer than I showed-- it wouldn't fit well here. But the received metadata is shown in full, and location and other personal metadata have been removed.

Other methods of transfer, and apps from other vendors, may not be so strict. But your method of emailing the photo to yourself and then posting the received version is pretty clever and very safe.

Maybe you should stay away from chatrooms with seedy characters?

I hope this helps…

When you take a photo on an iPhone, your iPhone will normally include location information as part of the photo metadata. Thereafter, the location information travels embedded with the photo – unless you do something to remove it. I haven't tried to find out which actions on the iPhone itself will, or will not remove it.

In the Mac version of Photos, when you Export a copy of a photo, you can tell Photos to strip out the location by clearing the "Location Information" checkbox in the Export dialog. That affects the copy, not the original.

Keep in mind that if you take a photo near a recognizable landmark, someone may be able to figure out location even without embedded GPS coordinates. E.g., if you take a picture of your 1st grade student right outside the school, with the sign that has the name of the school in big letters in the background, anyone in your hometown would be able to figure that one out.

Richard.Taylor wrote:

Servant of Cats wrote: …I found a Support document that indicates that you can tell the iPhone and iPad versions of Photos not to share location information, at the time that you share a photo from within the Camera or Photos apps.

Well, that link isn't about sharing, but rather it shows how to remove the location information that appears on the phone, and so what gets shared.

Did you scroll down to the section that says "Don't share location metadata when you share photos in Photos on iPhone or iPad"?

Manage location metadata in Photos - Apple Support

H1290 wrote:

I wonder why Photos was programmed like that? Don’t the times when it’s a bad idea to include by default the location the photo was taken in, outweigh the times when it’s a good idea? Worth thinking about anyways.

The designers may have been thinking that most photos are taken for the use of the person taking the photo, or their friends or family.

I found a Support document that indicates that you can tell the iPhone and iPad versions of Photos not to share location information, at the time that you share a photo from within the Camera or Photos apps.

See: Manage location metadata in Photos - Apple Support

So they were thinking at least a little bit about that, too.

Servant of Cats wrote: …I found a Support document that indicates that you can tell the iPhone and iPad versions of Photos not to share location information, at the time that you share a photo from within the Camera or Photos apps.

Well, that link isn't about sharing, but rather it shows how to remove the location information that appears on the phone, and so what gets shared. I'm not sure that I'd want the location to not appear on my own phone at all, even in the Map view, and not to even be able to search for those pictures on my phone by location. Luckily, the location info is still available from the original file, so it can be turned back on.

Ideally this would be a setting in Safari or in the Share Options dialog in Photos.

When you share a photo in a Shared album, the location will be removed.

For some sharing methods Apple is automatically removing the locations.

Oh, I do get it. Even if you think that they aren't creeps, you can't really depend on who's listening or who they are copying things to. It's the Internet!

I can't see a simple way to do a Share and keep Location turned off by default. Seems like a good idea to have a "keep as default" setting, there. You can make suggestion to Apple, here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

They have change some things lately in response to suggestions, so it's worth a try.

Servant of Cats wrote: …Did you scroll down to the section that says "Don't share location metadata when you share photos in Photos on iPhone or iPad"?

Well, yes, but that's exactly the thing that H1290 was asking NOT to have to do. And the others in that link are temporary as well.