Your photos know where you live: EXIF, GPS, and how to share a clean copy
Every photo you take quietly files a report about you. Inside the file, alongside the pixels, your phone records where you were standing, often to within a few meters, plus the exact second you took the shot, the device you own, and the camera settings you used. It’s called EXIF data, it’s been standard in every camera and phone for decades, and it travels with the photo when you share the file. Most people have never seen it, which is understandable, because it’s invisible, and unfortunate, because anyone who receives your photo can read it with two clicks.
What’s actually in there
EXIF began innocently, as a place for cameras to note shutter speed and aperture so photographers could learn from their shots. Phones inherited the standard and, being phones, enriched it. A typical iPhone or Android photo today carries the GPS coordinates of where it was taken, accurate enough to identify a specific house, the date and time to the second, the phone’s exact model, and technical details down to the lens. Paste the coordinates from a photo taken in your kitchen into any map, and the map draws a pin on your roof.
None of this shows in the image itself. Two photos can look pixel-identical while one says nothing and the other says “taken at this address, last Tuesday, 7:43 in the evening, on this specific phone.”
Where it leaks, and where it doesn’t
Here’s the part worth getting precisely right, because the internet oversells both the danger and the safety. The big social platforms, Instagram, Facebook, and their peers, strip EXIF from photos when they publish them, mostly because they recompress everything anyway. So the classic scare, “stalkers read GPS off your Instagram,” is largely outdated.
The leaks happen in direct sharing, where files travel whole. Email attachments keep EXIF intact. Photos shared through cloud drive links keep it. Messaging apps are a coin flip: many strip metadata when sending “as a photo” but preserve everything when sending “as a file” or “original quality,” a distinction nobody remembers mid-conversation. And classifieds are the sharp edge: photograph your old sofa in the living room, attach it to a local marketplace listing or hand it to a buyer in chat, and depending on the platform, you may have just given a stranger your address along with your asking price.
The honest rule: assume any photo shared as a file carries everything, and platforms that visibly recompress your image probably scrubbed it.
Check one of your own photos
Skepticism is healthy, so audit yourself. On an iPhone, open any photo and swipe up, or tap the info button: if there’s a map under it, that location is in the file. On Android, open a photo in Google Photos and tap the three-dot menu. On Windows, right-click any photo file, choose Properties, then Details, and read what your camera wrote. Do this with a photo taken at home. It reliably changes how people feel about the topic.
How to share a clean copy
Prevention first: iPhones let you strip location per share, tap Options at the top of the share sheet and switch Location off, and both iPhone and Android let you deny the camera location access entirely, which stops the recording at the source. Both are good habits with the same weakness: you have to remember, every time, forever, and the failure mode is silent.
The systematic fix is simpler: when a photo matters, share a clean copy instead of the original file. Any process that rebuilds the image, and only carries across the picture itself, drops the report. Converting the photo’s format does exactly this when the converter is built that way. The converter on this page outputs clean files by default: pixels in, pixels out, no GPS, no timestamps, no device fingerprint, with the image itself untouched. It also bakes in the correct rotation first, so the photo doesn’t arrive sideways on software that ignores orientation flags, the small detail that distinguishes careful stripping from crude deletion.
One more thing it doesn’t do: upload your photo in order to clean it. That matters here more than anywhere, because sending a photo to a “metadata removal website” hands a server both the image and the metadata you were trying to contain. Everything on this page runs inside your browser, on your device, verifiable with your Wi-Fi off. Cleaning a photo shouldn’t require exposing it, and here it doesn’t.
The proportionate response
No panic is called for. Photos shared to big platforms are mostly scrubbed for you, and most of what’s in EXIF is boring to everyone but you. The proportionate move is knowing which shares carry the file whole, emails, marketplace listings, “original quality” sends, and having a ten-second way to produce a clean copy when it counts. That’s the tool below. Drop in a photo, take out a photo, and nothing more than a photo.