TidyToolsWhat a photo gives away
Alongside the picture itself, cameras write a block of data called EXIF. It was designed for photographers — so you could look back and see which lens and shutter speed produced a shot — and for that it's genuinely useful. The trouble is what got added later.
When location services are enabled for the camera, a phone stamps the latitude and longitude into every photo it takes. Not the town. The spot. Usually within a few metres, which in practice means a specific house, a specific desk, a specific hotel room. It also records the precise second, the phone's make and model, and often a serial-number-like identifier that is consistent across everything that device has ever photographed.
None of this is visible when you look at the picture, and all of it travels with the file when you send it to someone.
When it matters, and when it doesn't
Large social networks — Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn — strip EXIF when you upload, so posting a holiday snap there doesn't broadcast your coordinates. That has quietly taught people that metadata is a solved problem. It isn't, because the places where it survives are the ones that matter more:
- Selling something online. Marketplace listings, classified ads and forum posts frequently keep the original file. A photo of a bike in a driveway can carry the driveway's coordinates.
- Email and messaging attachments. Send a photo as a file rather than through a compressing chat app and it arrives complete, metadata and all.
- Anything you upload to a small site. Personal blogs, club galleries, school portals and most WordPress installs store what you give them.
- Documents and PDFs. Photos dropped into a document usually keep their EXIF inside it.
The other half of the story is dates. A photo's metadata is often the only honest record of when something happened — insurance claims, disputes over damage, evidence that work was done on a given day. Copying a file changes the file's date; it does not touch the date inside.
What "removing" actually does here
For JPG and PNG files, the clean copy is made by cutting the metadata sections out of the file and leaving everything else exactly as it was. The picture is not re-compressed, so there is no quality loss whatsoever — the image bytes in the clean copy are identical to the ones you started with. Only the notes are gone.
The one thing deliberately kept is the colour profile, which describes how the colours should be interpreted. It says nothing about you, and dropping it can visibly shift the colours of a photo, so it stays.
Some editors claim to remove metadata but only blank the fields they know about, leaving the rest — maker notes, thumbnails, XMP blocks — quietly in place. It's worth knowing that a photo's embedded thumbnail is a common trap: crop something sensitive out of a picture, and the small preview stored inside the file can still show the original, uncropped frame. Cutting the whole section out avoids that entire class of problem.
Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read directly by your browser and never leaves your device — there is no server involved, no account and nothing stored. Load the page once, disconnect from the internet, and it still works. The only thing that would ever leave this page is the map link, and only if you deliberately click it.
Why does my photo have no location on it?
Several ordinary reasons: location services were off for the camera, the photo came from a device without GPS such as a webcam or a scanner, it was screenshotted or edited, or it has already passed through a service that strips metadata. A photo downloaded from Instagram or Facebook will essentially never have coordinates.
Does the clean copy lose any quality?
None at all for JPG and PNG. The picture data is copied across byte for byte — only the metadata sections are removed. This is not a re-save, so you can strip a photo as many times as you like without it degrading.
Can I strip a HEIC file?
Not in place, because rewriting that container safely is a different job. Use the HEIC to JPG converter with Keep date taken & camera info unticked — the JPG it produces carries no metadata at all. This page can still read a HEIC's metadata, which is useful because Windows generally can't show it to you.
The date on my computer disagrees with the date here. Which is right?
The one here. Your file manager shows when that copy of the file was created, which changes every time the photo is copied, downloaded or restored from a backup. The date inside the file is what the camera wrote at the moment the shutter fired, and nothing you do in Windows or macOS touches it.
How accurate are the coordinates?
Usually within a few metres outdoors with a clear view of the sky, and considerably worse indoors or between tall buildings, where a phone falls back to Wi-Fi positioning. Treat them as pointing at a building rather than at a room. Note too that the coordinates are where the camera was, not what it was pointing at — a photo of a mountain records the viewpoint, not the summit.
Does removing metadata make a photo anonymous?
No, and it's important not to over-trust it. Stripping EXIF removes the filed-away notes, but the picture itself may still show a house number, a reflection, a screen, a name badge or a distinctive view. Metadata removal is one step, not a cloak.
Can I stop my phone recording location in the first place?
Yes. On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera, then choose Never. On Android it's usually a Location tags or Save location switch inside the camera app's own settings. Both leave earlier photos untouched — those keep whatever they already recorded.