Answer: Drop a photo above — EXIF, GPS and other metadata are stripped and a clean copy downloads entirely locally.
Remove EXIF and GPS metadata from photos before posting.
JPEGs from cameras and phones routinely carry EXIF data: the exact GPS coordinates where the photo was taken, the device model and serial, timestamps, editing software history, and sometimes the photographer's name. None of it is visible in the image itself, and all of it travels with the file when you post or send the original. For public posting, marketplace listings, or dating-app photos, that silent data leak is a real privacy issue: a single unstripped original can reveal your home address to anyone who downloads it.
| Field | Reveals | Sensitivity |
|---|---|---|
| GPS coordinates | Where the photo was taken | High — often a home or school |
| DateTimeOriginal | Exact capture time | Medium — patterns and routines |
| Make / Model | Camera or phone type | Low |
| Software | Editing history | Low — sometimes revealing |
| Artist / Copyright | Named owner | Depends on context |
The image is redrawn in your browser and saved as a new JPEG, so the metadata segments never make it into the new file. Your browser applies the orientation tag while decoding, so the rotation is baked into the pixels and portrait photos still display upright. Nothing uploads, and the result downloads as a clean copy. Social platforms mostly strip metadata server-side on upload, but that protection only applies to their re-compressed copies; the original file you attach to an email, listing, or chat app is on you.
There is a tension worth understanding: metadata removal protects your privacy but also removes proof of ownership — the timestamps and camera data that help when your work is stolen. Professional creators handle both by keeping originals (with full metadata, privately archived) and publishing stripped copies. For the enforcement side of that workflow — detecting when published images are reposted and acting on it — authAspect provides creator-focused monitoring and takedown tooling, which pairs naturally with a publish-stripped, archive-original habit.
Keep it in your private archive for provenance; keep it when delivering licensed work to clients who expect capture data; strip it for anything public-facing, anything sent to strangers, and any photo taken at or near your home. A consistent rule of thumb: if the file could end up in a stranger's hands, strip first.
EXIF is the best-known block but not the only passenger in an image file. XMP carries editing and rights information (and can persist edit history from tools like Lightroom); IPTC holds captioning and crediting from news and stock workflows; PNG files carry their own text chunks; and some formats now include provenance manifests — cryptographic records of capture and edits. A robust stripping approach re-encodes the image pixels into a fresh file, which drops all of these chunks at once. That is what re-encoding does and why it, rather than selective deletion, is the standard practice for privacy cleaning.
One consequence worth knowing: re-encoding also removes the orientation tag. Tools that copy raw pixels without applying it produce sideways portraits, the most common complaint about naive strippers. Modern browsers apply the tag when they decode the image, so here the rotation is written into the pixels and the clean copy displays upright without it.
The habit that survives contact with real workflows is short: strip before any public post, any marketplace listing, any chat with strangers, and any photo taken at home or at your children's school. Keep originals in a private archive with metadata intact — that archive is your provenance record and your negotiating position if work is ever stolen or disputed. For photos delivered to clients, ask what they expect: editorial clients often want capture data; commercial buyers usually prefer clean files. And when sending a photo whose location could endanger anyone in it, strip even if the platform claims to — the original attachment is the risk, not the platform's re-compressed copy.
Why re-encoding rather than deletion: metadata in JPEGs lives in segments between the file header and the image data, and while those segments can theoretically be excised, naive excision risks corrupting files whose segments interleave with other structures. Re-encoding draws the decoded pixels into a fresh file that simply never gains the metadata chunks — crude, but bulletproof across every camera and editor's quirks. The cost is a second lossy compression pass at high quality, visually indistinguishable for photos. Every clean copy here is exported as a JPEG at 92% quality, including PNG inputs, so PNG transparency is lost and a PNG original is the file to keep if you need it lossless. Knowing this, you can trust the simple approach: it is not a shortcut, it is the robust path.
The people who never leak location data are not the most paranoid; they are the ones who made stripping automatic. Fold it into your export flow — one extra step before upload, or a rule that anything saved into a "to share" folder gets cleaned first — and the decision stops being a judgment call made in a hurry. Tools help most when they require no remembering, and a browser tool kept bookmarked next to your upload workflow is about as low-friction as privacy gets.
One last note on defaults: stripping everything is the safe choice for anything you share, because the cost of over-stripping is close to zero (a lost lens note or capture time) while the cost of under-stripping can be your home address in a stranger's hands. Keep originals for provenance, and default to clean files for everything that leaves your machine.