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← Go dark · Mission 6 of 17

Strip the hidden location out of your photos before you send them

Most phone photos carry where they were taken, which phone took them and when. ExifTool shows you all of it, then removes it in one command, for one photo or a whole folder, without touching a single pixel.

20 minBeginnerTools: FreeStep 1 free
Tested 7 Oct 2026 · ExifTool 13.59 (official Windows 64-bit zip), Windows 11, public-domain phone and camera photos from Wikimedia Commons
ExifTool working on your PC with no installer and no admin rights
The skill to see exactly what a photo gives awayGPS position, phone model, date, sometimes a camera serial number
One command to remove just the location, and one to remove everything
  • A clean copy of a whole folder in under a second, with your originals left alone
Before you start
  • Level 0 done (you can open a terminal and cd into a folder)
  • A photo you took on your phone (copy it to your PC first)
  • About 35MB of disk space
01/06Get ExifTool (no installer)0 done
STEP 01 of 06~5 min

Get ExifTool (no installer)

ExifTool is the free tool the pros use to read and edit photo data. The Windows version is a zip you just unpack.

  1. Go to the official site, exiftool.org ↗, and under Windows download the 64-bit zip (named like exiftool-13.59_64.zip, about 11MB). The link goes to SourceForge, which is where the author hosts it.

  2. Open PowerShell and run these four lines. They unzip it into a folder called exiftool in your user folder and give the program a simpler name. If your version number is different, change 13.59 to match.

    Windows (PowerShell)
    cd $HOME\Downloads
Expand-Archive exiftool-13.59_64.zip -DestinationPath .
Move-Item exiftool-13.59_64 $HOME\exiftool
Rename-Item "$HOME\exiftool\exiftool(-k).exe" exiftool.exe

  3. Now tell this PowerShell window where to find it, and check it works:

    Terminal
    Set-Alias exiftool "$HOME\exiftool\exiftool.exe"
exiftool -ver
    Output
    13.59
    Mac (or use the .pkg from exiftool.org)
    brew install exiftool
    Ubuntu / Debian
    sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl
    TipThe Set-Alias line only lasts until you close the window. Paste it again each time you open a new PowerShell. Nothing is installed system-wide, which is also why it needs no admin rights.
✓
Checkpointexiftool -ver prints a version number.
If it breaks'exiftool' is not recognised + 2 more
'exiftool' is not recognised
You're in a new window. Run the Set-Alias line again. If that fails too, check the file exists: dir $HOME\exiftool should list exiftool.exe and a folder called exiftool_files.
Expand-Archive says the path does not exist
Your browser saved the zip somewhere else or with a different name. Run dir *.zip in Downloads to see the exact name.
I moved exiftool.exe and now it's broken
The .exe needs the exiftool_files folder sitting next to it. Keep them together.
Still stuck? Ask the community
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