Strip EXIF and GPS before you share a photo

A JPEG is not only pixels. The file can carry an EXIF block with GPS coordinates, a timestamp, the camera or phone model, and sometimes a thumbnail. That is useful in Lightroom. It is a leak when you email a house photo, post a hike, or send an ID crop. Wikipedia’s EXIF overview is the plain-language map of what can sit in that header.

What people accidentally publish

• The street outside their apartment, encoded as GPS in a marketplace listing.
• A child’s school location, sitting in a sports-day JPEG.
• A timestamp that contradicts a story they thought was anonymous.
• A camera serial or software tag they never meant as a fingerprint.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation treats location as a first-class privacy issue. EXIF GPS is just location data with a friendlier filename.

What StackImage removes (and what it does not)

Strip EXIF walks a JPEG and drops the APP1 EXIF segment. The pixels stay. Orientation that lived only in the tag is not magically “fixed” as a pixel rotate unless you also run Rotate. Non-JPEG files (PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF) are left unchanged. We do not claim to wipe XMP, IPTC, or C2PA Content Credentials. If you need a full metadata audit, use a desktop inspector.

1. Open Strip EXIF and drop the JPEG (or a batch).
2. Confirm the file is actually JPEG. Other formats will download unchanged.
3. Download the cleaned file and share that copy, not the camera original.

Also check the platform

Some apps strip location on upload. Some do not. Apple documents how iPhone location attaches to photos in Control the location information you share. Do not rely on a social network to finish the job. Clean the file first.

Sources