What your photo file says about you

A seller photographs a used camera on a kitchen table, uploads six angles to a classifieds site, and sells it within a week. Nothing in that transaction is unusual except one detail: each of those files still carried the latitude and longitude of the kitchen, written down to six decimal places, and the buyer downloaded all six.

This is not a hypothetical edge case, and it does not require anyone to be careless. The data is added by the phone, kept by the gallery app, sometimes kept by the platform, and never shown to the person uploading it. This page is about what is actually in a photo file, which paths let it out, and what to do about it.

Two files in one

A JPEG is a container, not a picture. It is a sequence of labelled blocks: a few descriptive blocks at the front, then the compressed image, then an end marker. The picture is one of the blocks. The others are metadata, and they are not an afterthought — they were designed to travel with the image so that a photographer or a print shop could tell what the camera did.

Inside the EXIF block, on a photo straight out of a current phone, you can expect to find:

the manufacturer and model, and often the lens
the capture time, to the second, in the camera's local time zone
exposure, aperture, ISO and focal length
the orientation the phone was held in
sometimes a body serial number
a GPS block, if location tagging is on

Two other blocks sit alongside it. XMP is a more modern format, used by editors, and can carry an editing history: which application, which version, sometimes which presets. IPTC is the older press-industry standard and often holds a caption, a byline, a copyright line and a contact address.

The size of this is not trivial. A phone photo's metadata commonly runs 10 to 60 kilobytes — a good part of which is a thumbnail of the image itself, embedded so a file browser can show a preview without decoding the full file.

How precise is the location, really

Outdoors, with a clear view of the sky, a consumer phone generally resolves to somewhere in the 5 to 10 metre range. That is not a neighbourhood or a street — that is a doorway. Six decimal places of a degree is roughly 11 centimetres of theoretical precision; the number is written far more precisely than the hardware can measure, and 5 to 10 metres is the useful figure.

The indoor case is less obvious and often worse. A phone that cannot see enough satellites falls back to other signals, and one of those fallbacks is the last position it knew. A photo taken in a basement can end up tagged with an address from earlier in the day.

One correction to a common claim. The advice you usually read is about social networks, and it is out of date in the wrong direction: the large social platforms have stripped metadata on upload for years, so a photo posted there is usually clean. The places where it survives are the ones people forget to think about — classifieds, marketplace listings, forum attachments, email, direct messages, and anything a buyer downloads and re-uploads elsewhere.

The four ways it gets out

1. You send the original to a stranger. A classifieds buyer asks for more photos and you email them. That file is the original, with everything in it.

2. The platform keeps what you uploaded. Many do strip metadata on their display copies. What matters is the copy they hand to a buyer who clicks download, and whether that is the processed copy or the original. This differs by platform and changes without announcement, which is exactly why relying on it is a bad plan.

3. You also publish the original elsewhere. The same photo goes to three sites. One of them stores originals. You cannot tell which one from the outside.

4. Somebody else's copy is out of your control. Once a file with coordinates in it has been downloaded, no later cleanup reaches that copy. This is the reason to clean before publishing rather than after.

Checking a file yourself

You do not need a special tool to find out whether your photo has a location in it. Any of these will show you:

Windows: right-click the file, Properties, Details tab. The camera fields appear under Origin, and the location under GPS.
macOS: open in Preview and press Command-I. The GPS tab appears only when coordinates exist.
Command line: exiftool yourfile.jpg prints every tag, grouped by block. The [GPS] group is the one to look at.

Windows Explorer is the fastest check but also the least complete: it shows a curated subset, and it will happily report nothing while an XMP block still contains an editing history. If you want certainty, use exiftool.

Three ways to remove it, and what each one costs you

Approach	What actually happens	Cost
Screenshot the photo	The screen is captured as new pixels; nothing from the original file survives	Resolution drops to your screen size, and the colour and sharpness are re-rendered. Fine for a receipt, bad for a product photo.
Re-save from an editor	The editor decodes the image and encodes it again, usually discarding metadata	Every re-encode loses a little quality. Most editors also keep some metadata unless told not to, so you are trusting a setting.
Strip the metadata blocks	The container is rewritten with the descriptive blocks removed; the compressed image is copied through untouched	No quality change at all, because nothing is decoded. This is what the metadata remover does.

The third option is the only one that is lossless, which matters if the photo is going somewhere that judges it: a marketplace that requires a minimum pixel size, a portfolio, a print order.

What stripping does not fix

It is worth being clear about the boundary, because a clean file creates a false sense of safety.

What is visible in the photo. A mirror, a reflection in a kettle, post on the hall table, a street sign out the window, the view from a balcony. The metadata was never the biggest problem in a photo taken in front of your own front door.
Anything you typed into the listing. The caption, the description, the return address on the parcel.
Sequence and timing. Six photos uploaded together, all with the metadata gone, still show a coherent sequence of a single object in a single room.
Copies already out there. Cleaning is a forward-looking action.

When this matters, and when it does not

For a photo of a product on a plain white background, taken in a studio, the metadata is close to meaningless and removing it is just tidiness. For a photo taken at home, for a listing that will be public, for a buyer who will download it, removing it is the difference between publishing a picture of an object and publishing a map to the object.

The rough test: if the photo was taken somewhere you would not put in the listing text, the metadata is worth clearing. That covers most photos taken at home, which is most photos people sell things with.

Clean a batch of photos

The photo metadata remover reads each file first and tells you what is inside it — including the coordinates as decimal degrees — then hands back copies with the identifying blocks gone. It runs entirely in your browser, which for this particular job is the whole point: you are not sending photographs of your home to somebody else's server.

Related: HEIC to JPG for iPhone photos, and Convert Image Format for WebP and PNG conversions.

Written October 2026. Block names and tag numbers follow the JPEG (ISO/IEC 10918) and EXIF (CIPA DC-008) specifications; the GPS precision figure is the working range for consumer phone hardware rather than a specification.