Many smartphones come with geotagging turned on as a default; if the phone has a good position fix from GPS or cell tower data, it will embed these coordinates into the EXIF header of the photograph.This is my preferred setting, but there are times when I want to remove this data, to protect the location where a photo was take. The free Windows program Geotag Security will remove the embedded coordinate geotagging data from all photos in a folder, while leaving the other EXIF data (date, time, exposure info, camera, focal length, etc.) untouched. Just select the folder with the photos you want to have scrubbed, and it does the job automatically:
As the caution above indicates, once the coordinate geotags are removed, they’re gone for good. So if you want to preserve the original geotagging data somewhere, you should first make a copy of the folder with your photos, and scrub the geotag data only out of the copy.
A $20 Pro version of Geotag Security is available that will monitor folders, and automatically scrub their geotagging data as you download them from your phone or camera.
Note: The Android app GeoEraser can also remove geotag data from a photo, but creates a new scrubbed photo, keeping the original unchanged.
There is a good alternative to Geotag Security, EXIFCleaner available at: http://www.superutils.com/products/exifcleaner/ It supports more metadata formats, fully configurable, and has a previewing feature. The bad that it’s free for 30 days only.