What Is EXIF Data? The Hidden Details in Your Photos

Every photo your phone takes comes with a little backpack of information you can't see. That's EXIF data, and it's the most common kind of photo metadata. It can tell anyone who opens the file when you took the picture and which phone you used. If location was switched on, it can also say exactly where you were standing.

I didn't think about it much until I started building tools for this site. Then I looked inside a few of my own pictures and went a bit quiet. So what is EXIF data, and how do you get rid of it before you share?

What is EXIF data?

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. It's a standard way for cameras and phones to tuck extra details into the photo file itself, right alongside the picture. The FBI has a plain-English explainer that's worth a read if you want the background.

EXIF metadata was made for photographers, and it's genuinely useful. It's how your gallery knows to sort pictures by date, and how your phone can show your holiday snaps on a map. The trouble is that it travels with the file. Send someone the original photo, or put it on your own website, and the details usually go with it.

What photo metadata shows about you

What's in there depends on your phone and your settings, but a typical phone photo can carry:

• the date and time, often to the second

• the make and model of your phone

• camera settings, like exposure and whether the flash fired

• GPS coordinates, if location was on for the camera

• sometimes a small preview copy of the image

The GPS bit is the one that matters. On their own, a time stamp and a phone model aren't much. A photo of your new kitchen with coordinates attached is basically your address.

Back in 2010, researchers showed that geotagged photos and videos posted online could be pieced together with maps and other public information to find where people live, and even spot when they're away on holiday. That was years ago, and phones have only got better at pinpointing where you are.

How to remove location from a photo on iPhone and Android

There are two separate jobs here. One is stopping your phone adding location to new photos. The other is taking it out of photos you've already got, because switching location off now won't clean the old ones.

On iPhone

Apple's guide to location metadata in Photos covers it all, and it's refreshingly clear. To stop it at source, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera and choose Never.

To share a photo without its location, select it in Photos, tap Share, then tap Options and turn off Location. You'll see "Location Not Included" once it's off. To take it off a photo in your library, open the photo, tap the info button, then Adjust Location and No Location.

On Android

This depends on your phone, which is a bit annoying. On a Pixel, open the Camera app, go to Settings, then More settings, and turn off Save location, as Google's Pixel Camera help explains. For other brands, Google has a page of camera location settings covering Samsung and plenty of others.

Google Photos is where it gets fiddly. Google's own help page says that if your camera added the location, you can't edit or remove it in Google Photos. You can turn off "Share photo locations" for a shared album or link, and new conversations leave it out by default. But if you download a photo and email it, the original location goes along with it.

How to remove metadata from photos in one go

Phone settings only deal with location, and only in certain places. If you want everything gone, the simplest way is to clean the file itself before it goes anywhere.

That's why I made a free tool to remove the metadata from your photos. Choose a photo and it shows you what's hiding in it, like the GPS location and the phone model. Hit "Remove it all" and download your clean copy. The photo is cleaned right there in your browser and never gets sent to me. It's free, no sign-up, and it works with JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC if your browser can open it. You'll find my other free tools in the Toybox.

Does WhatsApp remove metadata? (and Facebook, Instagram)

Honestly, it's murky, and I'd rather say that than guess.

WhatsApp. WhatsApp's help centre says photos are usually compressed when you share them, and you can send a file as a Document instead, up to 2 GB. It doesn't say what happens to metadata either way.

So I tried it. I sent a photo over WhatsApp as a document, then put the file I received through my tool. It found nothing hiding: just a basic JFIF header (the bit that says "I'm a JPEG") and no EXIF at all. That's one photo, though. Lots of people use the document option precisely to avoid compression, so I wouldn't assume it always strips things. Depending on the file, it could keep the data or drop it.

Facebook. Facebook doesn't publish exactly what it removes. When IPTC, the group behind photo metadata standards, tested the big platforms in 2019, Facebook showed no embedded metadata and stripped most of it from the saved file, keeping only a few rights fields like copyright. The FBI explainer adds that Facebook doesn't share EXIF data but may use it internally. So other people might not see your location, but that's not the same as Facebook never having it.

Instagram. In that same IPTC test, Instagram showed no metadata, but because you can't download photos from it, they couldn't check the file itself. I can't find anything official from Instagram either, so I'd treat it as unknown.

The bigger point is that each platform only covers its own patch. Email attachments and cloud folders like Google Drive pass the original file along, extra details and all. Cleaning it first means you know it's gone.

Quick questions

Can someone see where my photo was taken?

If the original file has GPS data and they open it in a photo viewer, yes. Plenty of apps show it on a map without any digging.

Does turning off location remove it from old photos?

No. It only stops new photos being tagged. Older ones keep their location until you take it out.

Does removing EXIF data change how my photo looks?

No, it sits alongside the picture rather than in it. The one exception with my tool is HEIC, which gets saved as a high-quality JPG.

Before you hit send

If you share photos for work, like product shots or before-and-afters, it's worth a quick clean first. Pop over and remove the metadata from your photos before they go anywhere. If they need to be smaller too, my social media image sizes cheat sheet has the right sizes for each platform, and my image size reducer will shrink them to fit.

Use them, don't lose them!

Julie