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Common fix · Photos

See where and when a photo was taken

By Updated How we write these

2 min read

What you’ll end up with

The place and time a photo was taken, read from the file itself — and the choice to remove them.

Phones write the time and, when the camera is allowed to use location, the exact GPS position into every photo they take. That information travels with the file: copy it, email it or send it as a document and anyone who receives it can read it.

So the answer to “where was this taken?” is usually already in the photo — if it was taken on a phone with location on, and nothing has stripped it since. Social networks, WhatsApp media and screenshots usually remove it, and then no tool can read what isn’t there.

What to do

  1. Read the photo’s metadata

    Drop the photo into the viewer and press Show metadata. If it has a location, the coordinates are at the top, with the date and time it was taken, the time zone, and the phone or camera. It works on a batch, and on iPhone HEIC photos as well as JPG and PNG.

    Open the photo metadata viewer

  2. See the place on a map

    Copy the coordinates into any map app, or use the map link beside them. Five decimal places is about a meter: close enough to pick out a single house, which is why it matters before you share a photo.

  3. Remove it before you send the photo on

    If the photo is going to someone who shouldn’t know where it was taken, remove the location and everything else in one click. The picture itself isn’t touched.

    Remove the location

Worth knowing

  • On an iPhone, swipe up on a photo in Photos to see its map, date and camera. In Google Photos on Android, swipe up for the same details. On Windows, right-click → Properties → Details lists the GPS fields; on a Mac, Preview’s Tools → Show Inspector shows them.
  • Tools that “guess” where a photo was taken from what’s in it — landmarks, signs, vegetation — are doing something else entirely. Reading the GPS data is not a guess: it’s what the phone recorded.

Questions

Can you find out where a photo was taken if it has no GPS data?

Not from the file. If the location was never recorded, or was stripped by a social network or chat app, there is nothing to read. What’s left is what the picture shows, which is guesswork rather than data.

How do I see when a photo was taken?

The same way: the date and time the photo was taken are stored inside it, separately from the file’s created or modified date, which changes when it’s copied. The photo metadata viewer shows both the capture time and its time zone.

Does a screenshot show where I am?

No. A screenshot has no GPS location, because nothing was photographed anywhere. It can still show a location in the picture itself — a map, an address, a boarding pass — which Blur an Image can hide.

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