Check EXIF Privacy Before Sharing Photos
Cameras and smartphones save EXIF (shooting details recorded automatically inside the photo file) with every picture: capture time, device model, exposure settings - and if location services are on, the GPS coordinates of the shooting spot end up inside the file too.
The problem is that this data can travel with the photo. If a picture taken at home or at work keeps its coordinates, your daily locations are exposed. Large social networks often strip EXIF on upload, but email attachments, original-quality messenger transfers, and personal server uploads pass the file through unchanged.
How to Inspect
Select a JPG in the EXIF metadata viewer on the image tools page to see capture time, camera, and GPS status immediately. The file is never uploaded; the browser reads only the header portion locally. When GPS data is present, a warning and the coordinates are shown.
How to Remove
The simplest removal is saving the image as a fresh file (re-encoding). Converting with the resize and WebP tool copies only the pixels into a new file, so EXIF is not carried over. You can also keep the original resolution and strip metadata with OS features (Windows file properties, macOS Preview) or command-line tools such as exiftool.
On the other hand, EXIF is genuinely useful for organizing photos: capture time helps sort files and narrow duplicate candidates. A safe pattern is to keep metadata on archived originals and strip it only from copies made for sharing.
Inspecting and Stripping Location With exiftool
Check whether a GPS tag remains, then strip it in one line if it does.
# 0) install exiftool (Ubuntu/Debian)
sudo apt install -y libimage-exiftool-perl
# on macOS: brew install exiftool
# 1) check whether the photo carries GPS (location) data
exiftool -gps:all photo.jpg
# → if "GPS Latitude : 37 33..." shows, the location is embedded
# nothing printed = already clean
# 2) strip all metadata (image quality untouched)
exiftool -all= photo.jpg
# → "1 image files updated" means success
# the original is backed up as photo.jpg_original
# 3) do a whole folder at once (overwrite, no backup)
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original *.jpg