What your photos’ metadata reveals (and how to remove it)
Every photo you take with your phone stores much more than the image. Inside the file, in a block called EXIF, travel the exact GPS coordinates of the location, the date and time to the second, your device model and dozens of technical parameters. Send the photo, and you send all of it.
The typical case: selling something from home
You post photos of furniture on a second-hand marketplace. If the platform does not strip metadata — and not all do — any interested party can open the file and read your living room’s coordinates to within meters. The same goes for photos of children shared in group chats, forum images or email attachments. This is not paranoia: reading EXIF takes exactly two clicks in any file-properties viewer.
What EXIF actually contains
The usual fields: GPS coordinates (latitude, longitude, even altitude), capture date and time, device make and model, exposure parameters, editing software used and — in retouched photos — sometimes a thumbnail of the original, unedited image, a classic source of leaks. Add XMP and IPTC, equivalent blocks used by professional editing software.
When to remove it
Before posting on marketplaces, forums or any site that does not recompress images; before sending photos to strangers; and generally whenever a photo leaves your circle of trust. Big social networks usually strip EXIF when recompressing, but they read it first — if that bothers you too, clean before uploading.
How to remove it without losing quality
Most online cleaners recompress the image (losing quality) and, worse, require uploading it to their server: to delete your location, you hand it to a third party. PixTodo’s metadata cleaner avoids both: it processes the photo in your own browser and rewrites the file copying the image data byte for byte, with no recompression — only the metadata blocks are dropped. If there are also visible elements to hide (faces, plates, documents), finish the job with the pixelation tool.