What Is EXIF Data? What Your Photos Reveal and How to Remove It

EXIF is a block of metadata that cameras and phones write into each photo: when it was taken, on what device, with what settings, and often exactly where. It does not show in the picture, it travels with the file, and it stays there until something removes it. If you post or send the original file of a photo taken at home with location turned on, you may be sending your home address along with it.

The name stands for Exchangeable image file format, a standard maintained by Japan’s camera industry body CIPA as DC-008, currently at version 3.1.

A real example

To show what this looks like, we read the metadata in a press photo downloaded from NASA’s image library, using Pillow. It has been through Lightroom and is a public release, and it still holds all of this:

The serial numbers are worth a second look. Two photos with the same body serial number came from the same camera, so a serial can connect an anonymous post to a named one. Timestamps with offsets reveal your time zone and your daily routine across a set of photos.

The block was 15,115 bytes, and the file also carried 16,218 bytes of XMP, a second metadata format often written by editing software.

GPS is the part that matters most

GPS data sits in its own section of the EXIF block, and most phones write it when the camera app has location permission. It holds latitude, longitude and often altitude and direction. To demonstrate, we added coordinates to a copy of that photo, and they read back like this:

{1: 'N', 2: (38.0, 53.0, 1.0), 3: 'W', 4: (77.0, 2.0, 11.0)}

That means 38 degrees 53 minutes 1 second north, and 77 degrees 2 minutes 11 seconds west. Those numbers are a point on a map, typically accurate to within a building or two. No skill is needed to read them, since many photo viewers show a map automatically.

So the risk is practical. Photos of your children at home, an item you are selling from your house, or a holiday snap posted during the trip can reveal more than you meant to share. Anyone in a sensitive position, such as someone who has left an abusive relationship, should take this seriously.

EXIF is not the only leak, though. Metadata is one of several places where location shows. Also look at the picture: street signs, house numbers and reflections can give away as much.

Other metadata you may not expect

• Thumbnails. EXIF can contain a small preview image. If an editor crops the photo but does not update the thumbnail, the preview may still show the uncropped original. Run a full strip on sensitive images.
• XMP and IPTC. These are separate metadata blocks. Removing “EXIF” alone may leave names and captions, and even location, in them.
• Other formats. PNG, WebP and HEIC can all carry metadata, despite the common belief that this is only a JPEG concern. Word and PDF files have their own version of this problem too. See what is inside a DOCX file.

Which sites strip it

This is where people want a neat list, and an honest answer is messier. Services rarely document this in detail, and what they do changes. Here is what is safe to say.

Services that pass your file along unchanged, so metadata stays:

• Email attachments.
• Cloud storage such as Google Drive, Dropbox and iCloud Drive. These keep the file as is, and if you share a link to the original, the recipient gets the metadata.
• Messaging apps when you send a photo “as a file” or “as a document”. This preserves the original.
• Your own website, unless your software strips it.

Photo-sharing services can expose it deliberately. Flickr, for example, displays a link to EXIF data by default, with privacy settings to hide it.

Major social networks such as Instagram, Facebook and X are widely reported to remove metadata from the copy that other people see, though we could not find first-party documentation that commits to this for each platform. They may retain the data on their own servers, and may use it themselves. Sending a photo through a messaging app in its normal, compressed mode also generally drops EXIF, as a side effect of re-encoding.

Forums, marketplaces and smaller sites vary a lot. Do not assume. The only reliable check is to test. Upload a photo with known metadata, download the public copy from another account, and look at it. Or, for anything that matters, remove the metadata before uploading, and it stops being a question.

How to check a photo

On Windows: right-click the file, choose Properties, then the Details tab. Look for the GPS section.

On a Mac: open the file in Preview, then Tools > Show Inspector. The “More Info” tab (the i) has EXIF and GPS tabs if the data exists. Apple documents the location view in Preview.

On an iPhone: open the photo in Photos and swipe up. A map means there is location data.

With code: this short Pillow script is one we ran on our test photo:

from PIL import Image

img = Image.open("photo.jpg")
exif = img.getexif()
print(exif.get(0x010F), exif.get(0x0110))  # Make, Model
print(dict(exif.get_ifd(0x8825)))          # GPS tags, empty if none

For a complete report, exiftool is the standard command-line program. It reads nearly every metadata format, not just EXIF.

How to remove it

Pick by how many photos you have and how sure you need to be.

Before you take the photo

Turn off location for your camera app. On an iPhone, that is under Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera. On Android, look under the camera app’s permissions. This is the fix that saves you from having to remember. Keep it on only if you value location for your own albums, and strip it on sharing.

When sharing from a phone

On an iPhone, select the photo in Photos, tap Share, then Options, and turn off Location. “Location Not Included” appears at the top of the sheet. You can also remove it from the stored photo with Adjust Location > No Location. Apple covers both in its personal safety guide. This removes location, not all metadata.

On a computer

On Windows, use Properties > Details > “Remove Properties and Personal Information”. Choosing “Create a copy with all possible properties removed” keeps your original intact.

On a Mac, the Photos app has Image > Location > Hide Location.

With exiftool

Its documented -All= option clears the metadata. exiftool keeps a backup copy with _original added to the name, so your original survives. This is the best choice for a batch, and it does not recompress the image, so no quality is lost.

By re-encoding

Saving a new copy of the pixels leaves the metadata behind. We confirmed this with a photo with GPS tags: drawn to a browser canvas in Chromium and exported as JPG, PNG and WebP, each result had zero EXIF tags and no GPS section. Our image tools work this way, so a copy from Compress Image or Resize Image drops EXIF and GPS as a side effect. There is no separate setting for it.

Pillow behaves the same when you save without passing the metadata along. In our test of the NASA photo, this left no EXIF and no XMP in the new file:

from PIL import Image

Image.open("photo.jpg").save("clean.jpg", quality=92)

The cost is a round of JPEG recompression, so quality drops slightly, and copyright fields you may want to keep are removed too. Also note that browsers apply the rotation stored in EXIF when they draw the image, so the pixels come out upright.

Check your work

Whatever method you use, confirm it. Open the cleaned copy and look at its properties again, and look for GPS in particular. Then send that copy, and not the original sitting next to it in the folder, which is the mistake that catches most people.