What does a photo reveal about you?
A phone photo usually records GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres, the exact date and time, the device model and its serial-adjacent identifiers. Anyone who receives the original file can read all of it in seconds, without special tools.
Updated 2026-08-22
What is actually in there
EXIF is a block of metadata written into the image file alongside the pixels. Cameras have recorded it since the late nineties and every phone does it by default. The routine contents are the capture timestamp to the second with a timezone offset, the make and model of the device, the lens, and every exposure setting — aperture, shutter speed, ISO, whether the flash fired.
The consequential field is GPS. If location services were enabled for the camera, the file records latitude and longitude, usually to five or six decimal places. That is a precision of a few metres: not "London" but a specific building, and often a specific room-facing side of it. Many phones also record altitude and compass bearing, which narrows it further.
There is more that people rarely think about. Some cameras write a unique body serial number. Many phones embed a small thumbnail preview, which is generated at capture and is not always updated when the image is later cropped or edited — meaning the thumbnail can still show what you cropped out. Editing software adds its own history, sometimes including the name of the machine or account that made the edit.
Who can read it
Anyone with the file. Reading EXIF requires no skill and no special software: most desktop operating systems show a good deal of it in the file properties panel, and free viewers show the rest. There is no barrier to overcome.
The important nuance is who ends up with the original file. Most large social platforms strip EXIF on upload, which is why people conclude the problem is theoretical — a photo posted to Instagram is not leaking your address. But sending the same photo as an email attachment, over most direct messaging apps in "original quality" mode, through a marketplace listing, in a cloud-drive share link, or as evidence to an insurer, delivers the file intact.
The real-world cases follow that pattern exactly. People selling furniture from home, photographing pets in the garden, sending "proof of work" photographs, or posting anonymously with an image attached — all of whom assumed a stripped upload when the file went out whole. Journalists and researchers use EXIF routinely to verify or locate images, which demonstrates how reliably it works.
The cases where it matters most
Anything photographed at home. A marketplace listing, a rental application, an insurance claim, a hobby forum post. The photograph shows a sofa; the file shows where the sofa is.
Anything photographed of a person who did not choose to be located. Photos of children are the sharpest version of this, and it is why school and club guidance increasingly asks parents to disable location on the camera rather than to trust the platform.
Anything sent anonymously or pseudonymously. The device model alone narrows a population considerably; combined with a timestamp and a location it usually stops being anonymous at all. This applies to whistleblowing, but equally to an ordinary complaint someone did not want traced back.
And anything at all that is going to a stranger for a transactional reason — a contractor, a buyer, a claims handler. There is no upside to including it and the cost of stripping it is nothing.
How to remove it
The most reliable method is to re-encode the image, because the metadata block simply is not carried into the new file. Converting a photo to a different format, or re-saving it, drops EXIF unless the tool deliberately preserves it. That is why the strip-metadata option on any decent converter is not a separate cleaning step so much as a default behaviour worth confirming.
Operating systems offer this too. Windows has "Remove Properties and Personal Information" in the file properties dialog. On macOS, exporting from Preview without location does the same. On Android and iOS the share sheet can strip location when sending, though the wording is easy to miss and the setting does not always persist.
Better than removing it afterwards is not recording it. Turn off location permission for the camera app. You lose the ability to sort photos on a map, which some people value highly and most never use, and in exchange no image you take from that point carries coordinates at all. It is the only fix that also covers the photos you forget to clean.
One caution: cropping is not stripping. Cropping changes the pixels and leaves the metadata block untouched, and as noted above it may leave an embedded thumbnail of the uncropped original. Blurring a face in an editor has the same problem. Treat metadata as a separate thing to deal with, because it is.
Where the tool you use matters
There is an awkward loop in the usual advice. The recommended way to clean a sensitive photograph is often to upload it to a website that strips metadata — which means handing the uncleaned original, coordinates and all, to a third party in order to have it cleaned. The file with the problem is precisely the file you have now copied onto someone else’s server.
Doing it locally avoids the loop entirely. A browser can decode and re-encode an image on your own machine, so the cleaned file is produced without the original going anywhere. That is how every image tool on this site works, and metadata stripping is on by default rather than being an option to find — the safer behaviour should be the one that requires no decision.
You can verify the claim rather than take it: open your browser’s network inspector before converting, and watch whether a request carrying several megabytes appears. If nothing does, nothing left your machine.