How to remove metadata from photos before you share them

What your photos are quietly carrying

Every photo a phone or camera takes has a second, invisible file tucked inside it. EXIF metadata records the make and model of the device, the date and time down to the second, the shutter speed and aperture, the lens, the orientation, the software that last edited it — and, if location services were on, the GPS coordinates where you were standing, accurate to a few metres.

None of it shows when you look at the picture. All of it travels with the file when you email it, upload it, message it, or hand it over. The photo looks like just a photo; it's carrying a small dossier.

Why the location data is the real risk

The GPS coordinates are the sharp end. A photo of an item you're selling, taken at home, hands a stranger your address. A picture posted from a hotel says which hotel, and when. A holiday album maps your movements by the timestamp — and tells anyone watching that your house is currently empty. People have been found, followed and burgled off the back of location data in photos they thought were anonymous.

Most big social networks strip EXIF when you upload — but 'most' is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. It doesn't cover email attachments, cloud folder links you share, messaging apps that send the original file, or the marketplace listing you assumed was private. The only safe assumption is that the data is there until you've checked and removed it.

See it first, then strip it

• Read: [EXIF Viewer](/image/exif-view/) shows every field in the photo, GPS included, without uploading it. Check for a latitude/longitude pair — that's the one that matters most.
• Remove by re-encoding: [Image Converter](/image/convert/) rebuilds the picture from its pixels and drops the metadata block with it. Convert JPG to JPG if you want the same format — the point is the rebuild, not the format change.
• Remove as a side effect: [Compress Image](/image/compress/) also rebuilds the file, so it strips metadata while shrinking it. Two jobs, one pass.
• Verify afterwards: re-open the cleaned photo in the EXIF viewer. Confirming is thirty seconds; assuming is how location data leaks.

The two steps are read and remove, and they're worth doing in that order so you know what you're dealing with. Reading the metadata shows you whether there's a location in there at all — many indoor photos have none, and some cameras don't record it. If there is, you'll want it gone before the photo leaves your machine.

Doing it without handing your photos to a website

There's an irony worth naming: uploading a photo to a website to remove its private data means giving that private data to the website. A metadata remover that transmits your file is solving the problem by committing it.

The tools above run entirely in your browser — the photo is read from your disk, processed in memory, and downloaded, with nothing sent anywhere. That's the only sane way to run a privacy tool. If you're sharing several photos, the [privacy-clean workflow](/workflows/) chains the steps so you strip a whole batch in one go. And the same principle covers screenshots, which are often more revealing than photos: run anything with an account number or an address on it through [Blur Sensitive Info](/workspace/blur-sensitive-info/) before it leaves your machine.