Every photo your phone or camera takes can store hidden information called EXIF metadata. It is attached to the file and travels with it when you share it, unless something along the way removes it.
What EXIF can reveal
- GPS location - the exact latitude and longitude where the photo was taken, often to within a few metres. This is the big privacy risk.
- Camera or phone make and model, and the lens used.
- Date and time the photo was captured, to the second.
- Camera settings (ISO, aperture, shutter speed, focal length).
- The software that last saved the file, which can show which editor or phone OS you use.
- An embedded preview thumbnail, which on some cameras is generated before cropping and can show parts of the image you thought you removed.
If you post or send an original photo, whoever receives it can often read all of this, including where you live or work.
The four kinds of metadata inside an image
EXIF is the name everyone uses, but a photo can carry several separate metadata blocks, and a thorough clean has to remove all of them.
- EXIF - written by the camera. Make, model, exposure settings, timestamps, orientation, the thumbnail, and the GPS sub-block with coordinates, altitude and sometimes heading.
- IPTC - the newsroom standard. Caption, headline, keywords, creator name, copyright notice, city and country. Added by photo editors and asset managers rather than cameras.
- XMP - Adobe's XML container. Edit history, ratings, keywords, face regions with names, and frequently a second copy of the GPS coordinates and creator details. Stripping EXIF alone can leave the location sitting here.
- ICC profile - the colour profile. Not a privacy problem, but worth knowing about because removing it changes how colours are interpreted, and re-encoding through a browser converts everything to sRGB.
Do social networks not strip it?
Speaking in general terms: large public feeds and photo-sharing sites usually re-encode every upload to their own size and quality, and that re-encode drops the metadata as a side effect. Messaging apps vary. Sending a photo as a compressed "image" often strips it; sending the same photo as a "file" or "document", or with an original-quality option, usually keeps everything. Email attachments, cloud drive links, shared folders, wireless transfers between devices and zip archives all pass the file through byte for byte, metadata included. Relying on the platform is not a guarantee. The only reliable approach is to strip it yourself before sharing.
How to remove it (privately)
Use our View and strip EXIF tool. Drop a JPG, PNG or WebP and it reads the metadata locally, then lists what it found: camera make and model, lens, capture time, ISO, aperture, shutter, focal length, software and orientation. If GPS coordinates are present it flags them in red with a link that plots the point on a map, so you can see exactly what a stranger would see. Then click Download clean copy. Everything runs in your browser, so the photo is never uploaded. iPhone HEIC files are not read directly; convert them first with HEIC to JPG.
How the stripping actually works
The tool does not edit the metadata blocks out of the original file. It decodes the image, draws the pixels onto a canvas, and asks the browser to encode a brand new file from that canvas, as JPEG at quality 95 or as PNG. A canvas holds only pixels, so nothing that lived in the old container survives: EXIF, IPTC, XMP, the embedded thumbnail and the ICC profile are all gone at once. This is the same reason our image compressor and resize tool also produce metadata-free output; they re-encode pixels too.
What survives and what does not
- Survives: the visible image, at the same pixel dimensions. Because the browser applies the orientation tag while drawing, a portrait photo comes out upright even though the tag itself is removed.
- Changes slightly: with JPEG output the pixels are re-compressed, so there is a small generation loss, invisible at quality 95 but real. Choose PNG if you need a bit-exact copy.
- Transparency: kept with PNG output; flattened onto white with JPEG output, since JPEG has no alpha channel.
- Colour profile: wide-gamut photos (Display P3 from recent phones) are converted to sRGB. On a normal screen the difference is hard to see, but a print workflow should keep the original.
- Does not survive: GPS, timestamps, camera and lens, edit history, keywords, face names, the thumbnail, and any custom maker notes.
What metadata removal cannot do
Stripping the file only removes what is written into the file. It does not touch what is visible in the picture: street signs, a house number, a reflection in a window, a face. If the image is going somewhere public, look at it as a stranger would, and use blur faces and data to obscure people and text before you publish.
A note on re-saving
Because the clean copy is a fresh encode, this is a good moment to shrink it as well. If you also want a smaller file, compress the clean copy with our image compressor. For the broader question of what "nothing is uploaded" means and how to verify it, read our guide to browser-based tools and privacy.