What Is EXIF Data? See and Remove Hidden Photo Details Before You Share
Every photo from a phone or camera carries more than the picture. Tucked inside the file is a block of details about how, when and often where it was taken. Most of the time that is useful: it is how your gallery sorts photos by date and shows them on a map. It becomes a problem when you share a picture with strangers and the file quietly includes your home's location. Here is what EXIF data is, what it can reveal, and how to check and remove it before you share.
What EXIF is
EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. According to the Library of Congress format description, it is a specification maintained jointly by JEITA and CIPA, the Japanese electronics and camera industry associations, and it adds structured metadata to image files. The latest version, Exif 3.0, was published in May 2023. The standard itself covers JPEG and TIFF files, and other formats such as HEIC, PNG and WebP can carry an EXIF block too.
EXIF is not the only kind of hidden data. Photos can also hold XMP (often added by editing apps), IPTC captions and keywords (used by news and stock photographers), a colour profile and a small preview image. When people say "remove the EXIF", they usually mean all of these.
What a photo can reveal
| Detail | Example | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| GPS location | Latitude, longitude and altitude | Can point to your home, school or workplace |
| Date and time | Date taken, time zone | Shows when you were somewhere, or that you are away now |
| Device | Phone or camera make and model, lens | Links photos to the same device |
| Serial number and owner | Set by some cameras | Can identify the camera, and sometimes you by name |
| Software | The app or editor used | Shows that a photo was edited, and with what |
| Preview image | A small copy of the picture | If an app crops the photo but not the preview, the old version can survive |
Not all of it is sensitive. The exposure time, aperture, ISO and focal length are harmless, and handy if you want to learn why one shot came out sharp and another blurred. It is the location, the dates and anything that identifies a device or a person that deserve a second look.
A worked example. EXIF stores a position as degrees, minutes and seconds plus a letter for the hemisphere. A photo taken near the Eiffel Tower might say 48° 51' 29.6" N and 2° 17' 40.2" E. Turning that into the decimal form a map uses is simple: 48 + 51 ÷ 60 + 29.6 ÷ 3600 = 48.858222, and 2 + 17 ÷ 60 + 40.2 ÷ 3600 = 2.294500. One second of latitude is about 31 metres, and phones record fractions of a second, so when the phone had a good GPS fix the position can be close enough to pick out a single building.
Where it survives and where it doesn't
Whether the details reach the other person depends on how the photo travels, not just on the photo.
- Usually kept: email attachments, cloud storage links, USB sticks, and "send as file" or "original quality" options in chat apps. These send the file as it is.
- Often removed: many social networks and messaging apps save a new, smaller copy when you post, which drops most metadata. Not all do, and the rules change, so don't rely on it.
- Little or none: screenshots, and pictures that have already been through a converter or editor that saves a fresh file.
Keep the metadata on your own copies. It is what lets you search your photos by date and place years later, and photographers use the artist and copyright fields to mark their work. The aim is to strip it from the copies you share, not from your archive.
Check and remove it with our tools
- Open the Image Metadata Viewer and click Browse. JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC and AVIF photos all work, and the file is read in your browser, not uploaded.
- Read the details, grouped under File, Camera, Photo settings, Dates, Location, Other and Extra data. If GPS data is found, the page warns you and offers Open in OpenStreetMap so you can see the spot. Copy all copies the list as text.
- Click Remove metadata to go to Remove Image Metadata, and choose the same photo (JPG, PNG or WebP). Under In this image you'll see what it found, such as the phone, the date and whether there is a GPS location.
- Click Remove metadata, then Download clean image. The tool checks the new file and tells you if anything was left behind.
- For an iPhone HEIC photo, convert it first with HEIC to JPG, then check the JPG in the viewer.
How it works: the picture is drawn again and saved as a new file, so only the pixels come across. The photo is turned the right way up first, so it doesn't end up sideways when the Orientation tag goes. A JPG goes through one more round of compression at high quality, which you won't normally see. The JPG / PNG / WebP Converter also writes a fresh file without EXIF, so converting a copy to WebP or PNG has the same effect. For documents, the PDF Metadata Remover does the equivalent job for author and software details in a PDF.
Stop it at the source
If you rarely want locations in your photos, switch them off in the camera.
- iPhone: Apple's personal safety guide gives three routes. To share one photo without its location, tap the Share button, tap Options and turn off Location. To remove it from a photo in your library, tap the More button, then Adjust Info, Adjust Location and No Location. To stop the camera recording it, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera and choose Never.
- Android: Google's help page lists the camera setting by brand: Save location on Pixel and Motorola phones, Location tags on Samsung phones, with similar names on other makes.
- Windows: in File Explorer, right-click a photo, choose Properties, open the Details tab and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. Microsoft's article on removing metadata explains the options, including making a clean copy.
Quick checklist before you share
- Selling something online or posting a photo taken at home: check for GPS and remove it.
- Sending photos to someone you don't know: send a cleaned copy, not the original file.
- Posting publicly: assume the platform might keep the data, and clean the file first.
- Remember what's in the picture too: a street sign, a house number or a school badge can give away as much as GPS. The Blur Image tool can hide them.
- Keep your originals, with their metadata, in your own library.
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