Remove location data from photos before sharing
Every photo your phone takes carries hidden information — the exact GPS coordinates of where you stood, the phone model, the exact timestamp, the camera settings, sometimes even your name. This data is called EXIF, and it travels with the photo when you email it, upload it, or post it online. Most services do strip it. Many don't.
What's actually inside a photo's metadata?
Open any photo from your camera roll in a metadata viewer and you'll typically find:
- GPS latitude / longitude — accurate to within a few metres of where you took the photo.
- Timestamp — date and time down to the second.
- Device model — "iPhone 15 Pro", "Pixel 8", etc.
- Camera settings — aperture, shutter speed, ISO, lens, focal length.
- Software version — exact iOS/Android version that took it.
- Edit history — every filter, crop, exposure adjustment applied in Photos / Lightroom / VSCO.
- Author tag — if you've ever set your name in your camera's metadata profile, it's there.
- Thumbnail of the unedited photo — sometimes, the original full-res image before any cropping or filtering.
Why this matters more than people realise
Personal safety
If you post a photo of your home, your car, or your child, the GPS coordinates in the photo metadata point a stranger straight to your front door. Posting a single photo from inside your home to a public Twitter / X account is sometimes enough to be doxxed within hours.
Professional confidentiality
Journalists protecting sources, lawyers handling sensitive cases, doctors photographing patients, security researchers documenting vulnerabilities — all of them routinely leak information through unstripped photo metadata. There's a small museum of high-profile leaks that started with one EXIF-tagged photo.
Real-estate / classifieds
Listing photos for an apartment for rent? The GPS coordinates in your photos reveal the exact apartment to anyone who downloads them — useful for finding the place, much less useful when stalkers do the same.
What about social networks — don't they strip it automatically?
Some do, some don't. As of 2026:
- Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), Reddit, LinkedIn — strip most EXIF on upload, but not always completely.
- WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Signal — generally strip on send, but the full-resolution option in WhatsApp preserves it.
- Discord, Slack — preserve everything by default.
- Email attachments, Google Drive, Dropbox — preserve everything by default.
- Your own website / blog / Substack — preserve everything unless you've explicitly configured otherwise.
The safe rule: strip it yourself before sending, and you never have to wonder.
How to strip it (the easy way)
- Open our metadata cleaner in your browser. Works on JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC, and most video formats.
- Drop the photo (or video) in.
- Click Convert. The output is byte-for-byte identical visually, just with the EXIF section emptied.
- Download the cleaned file. Share that one instead.
For sensitive workflows (journalists, lawyers, etc.), Formatly is processed on EU servers under GDPR, deletes everything after one hour, and never uses content for AI training. No signup required.
For technical readers: what stays, what goes
The cleaner runs the file through a re-encode that copies only the pixel data (and color profile, where present), discarding the EXIF, IPTC, XMP, MakerNotes, GPS, ICC author tags, and thumbnail-preview blocks. The output is the same dimensions and visual quality as the input. File size typically drops by a few KB to a few hundred KB depending on how much metadata was attached.
One caveat: video files have additional metadata streams (container-level, codec-level) that some metadata cleaners miss. Ours uses ffmpeg's -map_metadata -1 flag plus stream-level scrubs to catch the lot.