What EXIF is
EXIF — Exchangeable Image File Format — is a block of metadata written into the file by the camera. It sits alongside the picture rather than inside it, so nothing about the image changes when it is present, and nothing visible changes when it is removed.
A typical phone photo carries:
- GPS coordinates, frequently accurate to a few metres, plus altitude.
- Date and time the shutter fired, to the second, with time zone.
- Device make and model — which phone, and often which lens.
- Camera settings — exposure, aperture, ISO, focal length.
- Orientation, which is why photos sometimes appear rotated in one application and upright in another.
- Sometimes a thumbnail of the original image, which can survive cropping in older software and reveal what was cropped out.
Why it matters
The photographic settings are harmless and genuinely useful. The location and timestamp are a different matter. A handful of photos posted publicly can establish where someone lives, where they work, when they are away from home, and what their routine is — none of which the person posting intended to publish.
This has real consequences for people selling items online from home, anyone photographing documents in their kitchen, and anyone whose safety depends on their address not being discoverable. The data is invisible in every normal photo viewer, which is precisely what makes it easy to forget.
Who actually sees it
It depends entirely on how the photo travels:
- Major social platforms strip it. Facebook, Instagram, X and similar remove EXIF when they re-encode uploads — partly for privacy and partly because they re-compress everything anyway. They keep the data on their own servers; they just do not serve it to other users.
- Direct file sharing keeps it. Email attachments, messaging apps that send "as a file" rather than compressing, cloud links, and USB transfers all preserve EXIF exactly.
- Forums and small sites vary. Many serve the file exactly as uploaded, metadata intact.
The safe assumption: unless you know a platform strips it, assume the coordinates travel with the file.
How to check
On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties, then Details — GPS coordinates appear near the bottom if present. On macOS, open the image in Preview and choose Tools then Show Inspector. On a phone, the photo's info panel usually shows a map if location was recorded.
Removing it
Any tool that decodes an image and re-encodes it produces a new file from the pixels alone. The metadata is not copied across, because it was never part of the picture.
That is what happens in the compressor and the format converters on this site. They decode your image, draw it to a canvas, and encode a new file from that canvas. EXIF does not survive the trip. This is a side effect of how the tools work rather than a privacy feature, but it is a useful one — and worth knowing in the other direction too, because if you want to keep camera settings for your own records, you should keep the original file.
Windows can also do it directly: right-click, Properties, Details, then "Remove Properties and Personal Information", which writes a cleaned copy.
One thing re-encoding does not remove
Metadata is not the only identifying information in a photograph. The picture itself may show a house number, a street sign, a reflection, or a view identifiable from the surrounding landscape. Stripping EXIF removes the coordinates, not the content. If a photo needs to be anonymous, look at what is actually in the frame before worrying about the metadata.