Today’s Question: Can the GPS info be suppressed when exporting from Lightroom Classic?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can turn on the “Remove Location Info” checkbox in the Metadata section of the Export dialog to prevent GPS coordinates and other location data from being included in the metadata for exported photos. Note that you could also select “Copyright Only” or “Copyright & Contact Info Only” from the Include popup, which would also result in the location metadata being excluded upon export.
More Detail: In my recent webinar presentation on keeping track of the locations where photos were captured (available on my YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/4Xdl0Goa4dA) I shared a variety of ways you can add GPS location information to the metadata for your photos. That information can be helpful in a variety of ways, but you don’t necessarily want to include location details in photos you will share with others. For example, if you photographed a client at their home, you would likely not want to include location information for those images when exporting copies of the photos.
When exporting a photo that includes location information in Lightroom Classic, it is indeed possible to exclude the location metadata from the exported image. If you want to otherwise include all (or most) of the metadata in the exported images, you can choose “All Metadata” from the “Include” popup in the Metadata section of the Export dialog. You could also choose “All Except Camera Raw Info” if you want to exclude the adjustment settings from the Develop module, or “All Except Camera & Camera Raw Info” to exclude Develop settings and camera details.
With the above options for including much of (or all of) the metadata for the image being exported, you can turn on the “Remove Location Info” checkbox in order to prevent the GPS coordinates and other location information from being included in the metadata for the exported image.
In addition, you could exclude location information along with most of the other metadata by choosing either the “Copyright Only” or “Copyright & Contact Info Only” option from the Include popup in the Export dialog.