Your photos carry hidden data — and re-encoding leaves it behind

2026-09-17

A photo you post is more than its pixels. Tucked inside the file, most phone photos carry EXIF metadata: when the shot was taken, on what device, with what settings — and, if location was on, GPS coordinates precise enough to find the doorstep.

When that matters and when it doesn't

Big social platforms strip location data from public display, so casual posting there is less exposed than people fear. The risk lives everywhere else: images attached to emails, uploaded to marketplaces and forums, sent to strangers in chat, published on your own site. In those channels the file usually travels exactly as you saved it — metadata included.

Why a re-encoded copy doesn't carry it

Every tool on this site works the same way: the image is decoded to raw pixels in your browser, processed, and written out as a brand-new file. The new file contains the picture — and only the picture. EXIF blocks live in the original file's structure, not in the pixels, so they simply are not part of what gets written. This is a side effect of how browser-side processing works, and a convenient one.

One honest caveat, because our compressor has a guard that matters here: when compression would have made your file larger, the tool hands back your original file untouched — and untouched means its metadata is still inside. The result line tells you when that happened ("kept the original"). If stripping metadata is the goal, convert the format instead: a format conversion always writes a new file.

What stripping does not do

Metadata removal is not anonymisation. The picture itself still shows what it shows — faces, street signs, reflections, a monitor in the background. And the filename is whatever you named it. Treat metadata stripping as closing one specific leak, not as making an image safe to share.

What we deliberately don't do

We don't offer a "keep metadata" toggle. Carrying EXIF across a re-encode means parsing and rewriting it, which is exactly the kind of complexity that turns into subtle bugs — wrong orientation flags are a classic. The photo comes out upright because the browser applies the orientation while decoding; the flag itself has done its job and retires.

The short version

• Phone photos usually embed time, device and often GPS location.
• Anything processed here is written as a new file of pixels only — metadata stays behind.
• Exception: when compression returns your original untouched, its metadata is intact — the screen says so. Convert instead when stripping is the point.
• Stripped metadata is not anonymity: the picture still shows what it shows.