EXIF: what your photos reveal, and how to check

Take a photograph on a phone with location services enabled, and the file records the latitude and longitude where you were standing, to roughly five decimal places. That is precise to about a metre.

It also records the exact date and time to the second, the make and model of the device, the lens, the exposure settings, the orientation, and on some devices the name you gave your phone — which for a great many people is their first name.

None of this is a conspiracy. EXIF — Exchangeable Image File Format — was standardised in 1995, long before phones had radios, so that photographers could keep the shooting data with the negative. It became a privacy problem when cameras acquired GPS and photographs started travelling.

Where it goes wrong

Selling something online. A photograph of a bicycle in your hallway, posted to a marketplace, with coordinates attached.

Posting under a pseudonym. The account is anonymous. The file is not. This is how a number of people have been identified who very much did not intend to be.

Sending a document photo. A photograph of a passport, taken at your kitchen table, carries your kitchen table.

Dating apps and forums. Some strip metadata on upload. Many do not, and there is no way to know which from the outside.

Job applications. A headshot with a timestamp showing it was taken at 14:20 on a Tuesday, while you were meant to be at your current job.

The most famous case remains John McAfee in 2012, located in Guatemala after a journalist published a photograph of him with the GPS tag intact. It is a good illustration precisely because the people involved were being careful about other things.

What the big platforms do

Most large social networks strip EXIF when they process an upload — but the important word is “process”. They read it first, and their servers keep what they read. Stripping protects you from other users, not from the platform.

And the coverage is patchier than people assume. Forums, marketplaces, messaging apps that send files rather than photos, cloud storage links, email attachments, and any site that serves the original file all tend to pass EXIF straight through.

How to look

You do not need a tool to check, though one helps.

• macOS: open in Preview, then Tools → Show Inspector, and click the GPS tab if there is one.
• Windows: right-click the file → Properties → Details.
• Linux: exiftool photo.jpg prints everything there is.
• In a browser: our EXIF viewer reads the file in the page and shows the camera, the date, the settings and a map link for the location, without uploading anything.

Try it on a photo from your own phone. Most people are surprised by how much is there.

How to remove it

The reliable method is to re-encode the image. Decode the file to raw pixels, then write a brand new file from them — a newly created JPEG has no metadata because nothing wrote any.

This is what happens automatically whenever you compress, resize, convert or crop an image here. Metadata removal is a side effect of the pipeline rather than a feature you have to remember.

There is one subtlety. Orientation is stored in EXIF, so a naive strip can leave a photograph sideways — the pixels were always rotated, and the tag was what told the viewer to turn it. Any tool worth using applies the rotation to the pixels before discarding the tag. Ours does.

If removing metadata is the whole point, the EXIF remover shows you what was there first and then produces clean copies, leaving your originals untouched.

What to keep

Not all of it is a liability. For personal archives, the capture date and the location are often the most valuable part of the file — in twenty years, “where was this?” is a question you will want answered.

A reasonable habit: keep originals with metadata intact in your own storage, and strip metadata from anything you publish or send. The two are not in conflict, and every tool here writes new files rather than modifying the ones you gave it.

Beyond EXIF

EXIF is the best known, but it is not the only metadata block in an image file.

IPTC carries captions, keywords, credit and copyright — added by photo agencies and editing software. XMP is Adobe’s XML-based scheme, used for edit history and ratings; it can record which software touched the file and when. ICC profiles describe the colour space, and are the one category you generally want to keep, because removing them can shift colours.

Re-encoding drops the first two along with EXIF. Colour handling is preserved by converting to sRGB, which is what every browser assumes anyway.