How to remove metadata from photos before sharing

Every modern camera, including the one in your phone, writes a small block of invisible information into every photo it saves. The image data is what you see; the metadata is everything else - and there is a lot more of it than most people realise.

That metadata travels with the file. When you text a photo to a friend, post it on a forum, attach it to a job application, or sell something on a marketplace, you are also handing over the metadata. Depending on where the photo was taken, that can be enough to put a pin on a map of your home, identify your specific phone across years of unrelated uploads, or expose details you assumed were private.

This guide walks through what is actually inside a photo file, why each piece matters, and how to strip it cleanly on every major platform - including a method that works entirely in your browser, with the file never leaving your device.

What is photo metadata, exactly?

Most digital photos use a container format called JPEG (or HEIC on newer iPhones, or DNG and proprietary RAW formats on dedicated cameras). Inside that container sits the pixel data and a series of metadata segments. The most common standard is EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), originally defined in 1995 to help cameras and editing software talk to each other. Two related standards usually ride along: IPTC, used by photographers and news agencies for captions and copyright, and XMP, an Adobe-led XML format used by Lightroom, Photoshop, and many other tools.

Together these can store, depending on the camera and the app:

• GPS coordinates - latitude, longitude, altitude, sometimes the direction the camera was pointing, and a timestamp accurate to the second.
• Date and time in the camera's local timezone, often with sub-second precision.
• Camera make, model and firmware, plus the lens model and serial number.
• The camera body's serial number. This is per-device, not per-model - two photos taken three years apart on the same phone share this value.
• Exposure settings: ISO, aperture, shutter speed, focal length, metering mode, white balance.
• Software trail: the OS version, camera app, and every editor the file has passed through.
• Author, copyright and caption fields if you ever filled them in.
• An embedded thumbnail. This one catches people out: editors sometimes update the main image without re-rendering the thumbnail, so the original, un-cropped, un-blurred version of the photo can still be sitting inside the file.

Why this matters more than it sounds

The most famous case is from 2012, when antivirus pioneer John McAfee was on the run and gave an interview to Vice. The reporter posted a photo of him from his iPhone. The EXIF coordinates pinpointed Guatemala, and McAfee was arrested days later. He was a fugitive billionaire and the lesson still applies to anyone selling a bike on Facebook Marketplace from their driveway.

Less dramatic, more common scenarios:

• Marketplace listings. Photos of furniture taken in your living room often carry GPS coordinates of your home. Strangers messaging you about the listing already know where to come pick it up - whether you reply or not.
• Dating apps and social media. Most major platforms now strip EXIF on upload, but not all of them, and not every endpoint within a single platform. Direct messages, "original quality" uploads, and downloads that re-share the file often keep the metadata intact.
• Cross-platform tracking. A camera body serial number is unique. If you upload anonymous photos to two different forums under two different pseudonyms, the serial number can link them. Several investigations into anonymous accounts have started exactly this way.
• Embedded thumbnails. A redacted document scanned and saved as JPEG can leak its un-redacted thumbnail. People have been doxed by their own censored images.
• Screenshots and screen recordings on phones can contain a surprising amount of system metadata too, including device model and the exact OS build.

What major platforms actually do

It is worth being precise here, because "they strip metadata" gets repeated without nuance and is partly wrong.

• Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter) re-encode public images and remove most EXIF tags from the public version. They do notnecessarily remove it from the original they store, and direct messages have historically behaved differently from feed posts.
• WhatsApp and Signal compress photos by default, which strips EXIF as a side effect. WhatsApp's "send as document" option preserves the original file, metadata and all. Signal's standard photo flow strips it; sending as a file does not.
• iMessage generally preserves EXIF when sending between Apple devices.
• Email never strips anything. Whatever is in the attachment is what arrives.
• Marketplace platforms (Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Vinted) have inconsistent and changing behaviour. Treat them as if they do nothing.
• Reddit, Discord, forums, file hosts usually preserve the file exactly as uploaded.

The safe assumption: strip metadata before you upload. Do not rely on the platform to do it for you, and do not rely on what was true the last time you checked.

How to remove metadata, by platform

iPhone (iOS 15 and later)

For a single photo or a batch:

1. Open the photo in Photos.
2. Tap the Share button.
3. At the top of the share sheet, tap Options.
4. Turn off Location. Optionally turn off All Photos Data to also strip non-location EXIF.
5. Tap Done, then share or save.

This works for AirDrop, Mail, Messages and most third-party apps. Note: it strips on send, not on the file in your library. The library copy still has everything.

Android (most modern versions)

Android does not have a system-wide stripper. The cleanest path:

1. Open Google Photos, tap the photo, then the three-dot menu.
2. Choose Remove location. This removes GPS but leaves device model, timestamps and serial numbers.
3. For a complete strip, use a dedicated app like Scrambled Exif (open source) or process the file in your browser - see the next section.

Windows 10 and 11

1. Right-click the photo and choose Properties.
2. Open the Details tab.
3. Click Remove Properties and Personal Information at the bottom.
4. Choose Create a copy with all possible properties removed. This makes a stripped duplicate next to the original.

Two caveats: Windows does not remove every tag (XMP fields can survive), and the embedded thumbnail is not always rebuilt.

macOS

Preview can hide EXIF but does not always remove it permanently. The reliable free option is exiftool:

1. Install via Homebrew: brew install exiftool.
2. From a terminal: exiftool -all= -overwrite_original photo.jpg.
3. For a whole folder: exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r ./folder.

ExifTool is the gold standard and removes essentially everything, including the embedded thumbnail when you add the -Thumbnail*= flag.

The browser-only method (works everywhere, uploads nothing)

If you do not want to install anything and do not want to upload your photo to a website, the cleanest option is to do it in the browser tab itself. Privvert's EXIF viewer and remover reads the file with the JavaScript FileReader API, parses the EXIF, IPTC and XMP segments locally, lets you see what is in there, and saves a stripped copy back to your downloads. No upload endpoint, no server log, no "we keep your file for 24 hours."

This is exactly the same approach you would use with ExifTool from a terminal - the JPEG container has metadata segments, you remove them, you re-save - just without leaving the browser. It works on iPhone, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, Chromebook. Anywhere the page loads.

Special cases worth knowing

HEIC and HEIF (modern iPhones and Samsungs)

HEIC files use the same EXIF tags but inside a different container. Most strippers that work on JPEG also work on HEIC, but a few do not. If you convert HEIC to JPEG to share it, do the metadata strip after conversion - some converters preserve EXIF and some do not. Our HEIC to JPG converter runs locally and lets you strip metadata in the same step.

RAW files (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG)

Photographer RAW formats are essentially metadata-with-pixels. Stripping EXIF from a RAW file can break tools that depend on white-balance and lens-correction tags. For sharing, export to JPEG or HEIC first, then strip.

PNG and WebP

PNG can carry text chunks (tEXt, iTXt) and timestamp chunks. Screenshots from many apps include the application name and version. WebP supports an EXIF chunk that is often forgotten by strippers built only for JPEG.

Screenshots

Phone and desktop screenshots usually do not have GPS, but they do have device model, OS version and timestamp. If you are sharing a screenshot to demonstrate a bug or report something publicly, strip first.

The redaction trap

Drawing a black box over a name in an image editor and then exporting to JPEG is usually safe - the pixel data underneath is gone. But:

• PDF redactions are not safe by default. Putting a black rectangle on top of text leaves the text in the file. Use a real PDF redaction tool that removes the underlying content rather than covering it.
• Cropping in an editor that preserves the embedded thumbnail can leak the un-cropped image. Strip metadata after cropping, always.
• Blur and pixelation can sometimes be reversed when the original area is small and the blur is weak. For genuinely sensitive content, paint a solid colour over it.

A short, sane workflow

1. Decide once. If you regularly share photos publicly, turn off location tagging in your camera app. iOS: Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera > Never. Android: in the camera app's settings, disable "Save location."
2. Strip on the way out. Before posting or sending, run the file through a stripper. Browser, ExifTool, the OS share sheet - whichever you trust and will actually use.
3. Verify once in a while. Drop a photo you just "stripped" into an EXIF viewer and confirm there is nothing left. Tools and defaults change.
4. Treat redaction as a separate step from metadata removal. Redact pixels, strip metadata, then export.

Why we built ours in the browser

It is genuinely strange that the standard advice for "remove EXIF from a photo" has been "upload it to a free website." The whole point of removing the metadata is to not give it to people. Uploading the file to a stranger to have them remove the metadata is the inverse of the goal.

Browsers have had everything needed to do this client-side for a decade - FileReader, Blob, ArrayBuffer, the download attribute on links. Privvert's image tools, including the EXIF stripper, image compressor, cropper, and format converter, all run entirely in the tab. The network panel in your browser's developer tools will show no upload because there is no upload endpoint to upload to.

Whatever tool you end up using, the rule is the same: assume metadata is there, assume it matters, and strip it before you share.

Frequently asked questions