What to remove from photos before posting online
Popular Science...
You might already be familiar with the online game GeoGuessr. But if you’re not, it’s where you get served up a Google Street View image at random, and you have to guess where in the world it is.
It’s a fun challenge to try, and the best players are very, very good. They use clues such as road signs, architecture, car models, shop signs, tree types, and sidewalk designs to determine locations, and when the time limit expires, GeoGuessr reveals the exact spot.
Pinning down geography from photos also happens to be one of the skills that AI chatbots are now excelling at, but it’s not something that you’d immediately associate with them. Try it with your favorite chatbot of choice: Save an image from Google Street View, load it into an AI conversation, and see how well it does.
The more well-known the street, of course, the better the AI will do. I gave ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude a photo from The Strand in London, and all three AIs got the right answer, using clues from the vehicles and buildings in the shot to work out where it was—without any other hints from me.
Then I gave the chatbots a fairly empty stretch of road in Russia, with nothing really to go off except the trees and the road markings. All three correctly named the country, though understandably they couldn’t be any more precise than that.
You can try it on your own images, too. Try feeding an AI an image from your last vacation, and see if it can work out where you are. If there’s enough detail in the background, and you’re at a well-known spot, the chatbot should get it.
Bear in mind that these tools can scan a vast number of online images and reviews, so they know which city square a particular monument is in, the types of trees that line certain coastlines, and which countries have cabs of which color.
And if you can do this with an image and AI, then anyone can do it in seconds. Someone who sees an image you’ve shared online has a decent chance of finding out where your home, office, or vacation spot is, which raises worrying privacy concerns. The old advice to remove location metadata from photos before you share them no longer applies—now you need to take AI into consideration too.
How to protect yourself
There are all kinds of ways scammers, hackers, and other bad actors could use the locations of your photos against you, from pretending to be you in reference to a hotel booking, to following you when you leave the office.
The best way to prevent this is to be careful about where your pictures are shared, rather than doing anything to the pictures themselves. You can use an image editor to blur out backgrounds and pixelate details (like the names of bars and restaurants), but it’s quicker and easier to just be wary about where your personal images are being shared.
Every social network has settings to control this, starting with the people you’re actually friends with. Go to share a photo on Facebook, for example, and you’ll see a little drop-down at the top of the post composer: Click this and make sure it’s set to Friends rather than Public, and it won’t be available to every passing internet user (or AI).
On Instagram, other users can see your posts whether or not you’re friends with them, unless your profile is set to private. To do this on the web, click Profile, then the cog icon next to your name, then Settings and privacy > Account privacy and turn the Private account toggle switch on.
On a platform such as WhatsApp, everything is locked down much more comprehensively. Your stories and status updates are only available to people you’ve specifically added, and there’s no way for others to access the photos and videos you’re sharing in your various group chats.
Of course, there’s always the chance that someone you share a photo with will post it online on their own social media profiles, but this is something you can discuss in your social circle and watch out for.
If you have to put photos of yourself online in a public way—for personal portfolios, for example, or to promote something you’re involved in with work or with your community—try and keep them as closely cropped and ordinary as possible, without any clues as to where you might be.
As scary as it might be to think that an AI can figure out where in the world you are just from a simple photo, a few common sense steps can make sure that these chatbots (and the people using them) don’t have anything to work with.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Popular Science’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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