Common Folk Collective

Based on a news report from KSHB out of Kansas City, MO I’ve noticed a lot of people posted the story to Facebook.

While it is true that photos from most modern mobile phones do use Exif data* which often contains your location via GPS you can prevent this information from being shared in a couple of ways. First you can turn off location services on the iPhone this is done by going to settings

Then turning off the location for your camera (if you use a different camera app you’ll have to adjust accordingly)

It should be noted though that I’ve noticed that a lot sites will strip Exif location data off of images. Craigslist, Facebook and Imgur seem to remove the data. Tumblr does now but didn’t in the past.

There is an easier way to avoid this though instead of posting images a JPEGs save them instead as PNGs which don’t contain Exif data.

*Exif data is actually pretty cool and attaches all kind of information to your photos here’s an example:

It contains a bunch of info about your camera settings and you can imagine if you were on vacation Exif data would come in handy in making a trip log.