What EXIF data your photos carry, and how to strip it

Nearly every photo taken on a phone carries a block of metadata called EXIF, written by the camera at the moment of capture. Most people never see it, and it travels with the file when you send it. The last one surprises people. Some editors update the full-size image but leave the embedded thumbnail untouched, so a crop intended to remove something can leave a small copy of the original behind. Usually it does not — EXIF is useful, and it is how photo libraries sort by date and place. It matters when a photo leaves your circle: a listing on a marketplace, a picture attached to a public post, a screenshot shared with a stranger, an image handed to an opposing party. Coordinates attached to a photo taken at home are worth thinking about before it goes out. Stripping EXIF means re-encoding the image without the metadata block. The thing to be careful about is where that happens: uploading a photo to a website in order to remove its location data means handing the file, location intact, to whoever runs that site. The operation is trivial to do locally, so there is no reason to. Our Image Metadata tool reads the EXIF in your browser, shows you what the file is carrying — including the location if present — and writes a stripped copy. The image is never uploaded, which is rather the point for this particular job.

Tools

1. GPS coordinates — often precise to a few metres, if location was enabled.
2. The exact date and time of capture, usually with a timezone offset.
3. Device make and model, and sometimes the lens.
4. Camera settings: exposure, aperture, ISO, focal length.
5. Occasionally a thumbnail that survives edits made to the main image.