EXIF Metadata

What EXIF actually stores

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. It's a tag-based metadata standard that cameras and phones quietly write into every photo you take. A single JPEG can carry hundreds of EXIF fields. The common ones include:

• DateTimeOriginal — when the shutter fired, down to the second
• GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude — exact coordinates if location was on
• Make and Model — e.g. Apple iPhone 15 Pro or Samsung SM-S928B
• LensModel, FocalLength, FNumber, ExposureTime, ISOSpeedRatings
• Software — the OS or editing app that last touched the file
• Orientation — which way is up, so viewers can auto-rotate

The privacy problem with GPS

If you take a photo at home with location services on, your home's latitude and longitude end up inside the file. Post the original JPEG to a forum, a marketplace listing, or a public bug report and anyone who downloads it can read those coordinates with a free EXIF viewer. The photo doesn't have to show your house — the metadata alone is enough to pin it on a map. This has been used to dox people repeatedly over the past decade.

Where EXIF lives — and where it doesn't

EXIF is supported by JPEG, TIFF, HEIC/HEIF, and most camera raw formats. PNG doesn't use EXIF in the strict sense — it stores similar metadata in tEXt, iTXt, and eXIf chunks. WebP and AVIF also have their own metadata containers. Either way, the principle holds: a still image format almost always has somewhere to hide tags.

How EXIF gets stripped

Re-encoding the image is the simplest way. When you run a photo through Toolkiya Compress Image or Resize Image, the tool decodes the pixel data, throws everything else away, and writes a fresh file. The new JPEG has no GPS tag because nothing in the new file came from the old EXIF block.

Some platforms also strip metadata server-side. Instagram, WhatsApp (in chat shares), Facebook, and Twitter/X generally remove GPS and most identifying EXIF on upload. Email attachments, AirDrop, direct file uploads to forums, cloud storage links, and marketplace listings usually preserve the original — that's where the leaks happen. iOS now also lets you toggle off location data per-share from the system share sheet.

When EXIF is useful

Strip-everything isn't always the right answer. Photographers use EXIF to remember which lens and aperture they shot at. Investigators use it to verify when an image was taken. Stock photo libraries index by camera model. The rule of thumb is simple: keep EXIF for your private archive, strip it for anything public — especially when the photo was taken from your home, your workplace, or your kid's school.