What is EXIF data?

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format)¹ is metadata written into the file at the moment of capture, following a standard maintained by CIPA². A typical photograph from a phone carries:

• GPS coordinates — latitude and longitude, often to within a few metres.
• Date and time — when the photo was taken, to the second.
• Device make and model — and sometimes a camera serial number.
• Camera settings — aperture, shutter, ISO, focal length, whether the flash fired.
• Software — what edited the file, and when.

None of it is visible when you look at the image. All of it travels with the file.

For a landscape photograph you are publishing deliberately, the GPS³ data is often a feature.

It stops being a feature in some very ordinary situations. A photo taken at home and posted to a marketplace listing carries your home address. An image sent to a stranger carries where you were when you took it. A photo of a document taken at an office reveals the office. A leaked press image can be traced back to a specific camera by serial number.

The problem is not that this data exists; it is that almost nobody realises it is being shared. Under GDPR, location tied to an identifiable person is personal data⁴ — see why where compression happens matters.

Most large social platforms strip EXIF on upload — Facebook, Instagram, X and others remove it, partly for privacy and partly because they re-encode everything anyway.

But this only protects you on those platforms. Email attachments keep EXIF. Files uploaded to most content management systems keep it. Images shared through cloud storage links keep it. Anything you hand to a client directly keeps it.

Relying on the recipient's platform to strip it is not a strategy, because you do not control where the file ends up next.

Re-encoding an image removes EXIF as a side effect. When a tool decodes an image to raw pixels and encodes it again, only the pixels survive — the metadata block is not carried across.

This is what PixSqueeze does. Compressing an image here produces a file with no EXIF, no GPS and no camera information, because the output is written fresh from pixel data. You can confirm it by checking the file properties of the result: the location and camera fields will be empty.

If you need to keep the image bit-for-bit identical and only strip metadata, that is a different operation and needs a dedicated metadata tool.

Strip metadata from anything you send to a person rather than publish to a platform, and from anything at all connected to where you live or work. Keep it on your archived originals, where it is genuinely useful for organising and searching your own library.

The risk is uneven, and assuming it is uniform leads people to either panic or ignore it.

Most large social platforms strip EXIF during upload processing, largely because they re-encode everything anyway. A photo posted to a major network is usually already clean.

The exposure is everywhere else: email attachments, forum and marketplace uploads, messaging apps that offer to send the original file, cloud storage share links, documents with embedded images, and images published directly to your own site. Those preserve whatever you handed them.

Two details that surprise people. Renaming a file changes nothing — the metadata lives inside it. And an embedded preview thumbnail generated at import is not always regenerated after editing, so a crop can leave the original framing recoverable inside the file.

Metadata is not uniformly a liability, and blanket destruction loses things worth keeping.

Usually worth removing before publishing: GPS coordinates, device serial numbers, and precise timestamps. These are the identifying and correlating fields.

Usually harmless and sometimes useful: camera model, exposure settings, lens. Photographers publish these deliberately.

Worth keeping in your archive: essentially all of it. Capture dates are what make a photo library sortable; GPS powers map views of your own collection.

So the pattern is not to destroy metadata but to publish stripped copies from an intact master — the same shape as never processing your originals. How to strip it covers the mechanics.