Photo metadata: check and remove EXIF, GPS and other details

Find camera, location and author metadata in photos. Learn what removal preserves, how orientation can change and why you should check the exported copy.

By ToolsNow · Published 30 July 2026

A photo can contain camera settings, capture dates, location coordinates and author information alongside the picture. Which fields are present depends on the device, app and export settings.

Before sharing a file, inspect it with the photo metadata viewer. Keep the original for your own records and check any cleaned copy before publishing it.

Three standards, not one

People use “EXIF” as a catch-all, but a single JPEG can carry three separate metadata blocks, written by different software for different reasons.

EXIF, the Exchangeable Image File Format, is what the camera writes at the moment of capture: exposure, aperture, ISO, focal length, lens model, camera make and model, date and time, and, if location services are on, GPS latitude, longitude and often altitude. Plenty of cameras also write a body or lens serial number.

IPTC came out of the news industry and describes the picture instead of the equipment: caption, headline, keywords, credit line, copyright notice, photographer’s name. If a photo has been through a picture desk or a stock library, that’s where the attribution lives.

XMP is Adobe’s XML-based container and the broadest of the three. Editing software uses it for ratings, labels, edit history and its own proprietary settings. Being extensible, it’s where unexpected things end up.

Which means in practice that a tool removing “the EXIF data” may leave IPTC and XMP sitting there. The photo still names you.

What’s actually sensitive

Not every field matters. Sorting the noise from the risk:

GPS coordinates are the sharp end. Consumer GPS is accurate to a few metres, so a photo taken indoors identifies a building, and a series of photos identifies a routine.
Camera make, model and serial number link separate photos to one device. A serial number is a persistent identifier across every photo that camera has ever taken.
Original timestamp records when, to the second, often with the time zone attached.
Software names the editing application and its version.
Artist, copyright and credit may carry your legal name even when the account posting the photo doesn’t.
The embedded thumbnail is the subtle one. EXIF can hold a small preview generated at capture, and in a handful of well-documented cases that thumbnail preserved the uncropped version of a photo that had been cropped before publication.

Why copying or converting may not remove it

Several intuitions here are simply wrong.

Copying the file copies the metadata along with it, because the metadata is inside the file, not attached to it.

Renaming or moving changes nothing at all.

Taking a screenshot creates a new image, but that image may contain its own metadata. It also changes the image dimensions and quality. Check the resulting file.

Converting to another format usually strips most metadata, because the converter rebuilds the file. But that depends entirely on the converter, and some carry metadata across deliberately. Don’t assume.

Sharing through an app can change which metadata remains. Behaviour varies by service, export option and version. Inspect the actual file you intend to share instead of assuming the service will remove location data.

Removing it without wrecking the image

The obvious approach, open the photo and save a copy, works and costs you quality. JPEG is lossy, so every re-save re-compresses and piles on artefacts. That’s a bad trade when the goal is deleting a few hundred bytes.

The better approach uses how these formats are built. A JPEG is a sequence of marker segments, and the metadata lives in segments of its own: APP1 for EXIF and XMP, APP13 for IPTC, COM for comments. Delete those segments and copy the compressed image data across byte for byte. PNG is a chunk stream, so tEXt, iTXt and eXIf chunks come out the same way. WebP is a RIFF container with EXIF and XMP chunks.

That’s what the EXIF viewer and remover here does, and it’s why the file gets smaller while the pixels stay identical.

Two consequences to watch for.

Orientation. Cameras often store the sensor image unrotated and record “rotate this 90°” as an EXIF field. Remove the metadata and that instruction goes with it, so an image relying on it can come out sideways. When that happens, run the original through the rotate tool first, which bakes the rotation into the pixels, then remove the metadata.

Colour profiles. The ICC profile is technically metadata, but it tells the viewer how to interpret the colours. Dropping it can visibly shift a wide-gamut photo, so keep it unless you need the smallest possible file.

Verifying instead of trusting

No tool can honestly promise every byte of every private extension is gone, because a file could carry data in a vendor block nobody has documented. For anything genuinely sensitive, check the result rather than the claim: run the cleaned copy back through a viewer and confirm the fields have gone. Checking with a different tool from the one that did the removing is better still.

Metadata isn’t a threat inside your own library. It’s precisely what makes photo search, timelines and maps work. The moment it changes character is publication.

Keep it on photos that stay in your library and your backups.
Strip it from anything you publish where you wouldn’t also post your home address: marketplace listings, forum posts, images on a personal site, attachments to people you don’t know.
Assume nothing about the channel. Platforms change their handling without announcing it, so stripping before upload beats trusting the uploader to do it for you.
Turn off location tagging in the camera app if you’d rather not create the problem in the first place. The cost is losing the map view in your own photo library.

Check the fields that matter for the picture you plan to share, including location, author and camera information. Metadata checks do not address identifying details that are visible in the image itself.

Sources and further reading

Last reviewed 31 July 2026.