What is EXIF data?

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is information your camera or phone writes into a photo file alongside the picture itself. You don't see it when you look at the photo, but any app — or person — that opens the file can read it.

What's inside

• Location — GPS latitude and longitude, often accurate to a few metres, plus sometimes altitude and compass direction.
• Date and time — when the photo was taken, sometimes to a fraction of a second, plus the time zone.
• Device — the make and model of the phone or camera, the lens, and on many cameras a serial number.
• Camera settings — exposure, aperture, ISO, flash, focal length.
• Software — the app or editor that last saved the file.
• A thumbnail — a small preview copy, which can show the photo before it was cropped or edited.

Photos can also carry other kinds of metadata: XMP (editing history from apps like Lightroom), IPTC (captions, names and copyright notes added by photographers and news agencies) and comments. Modern phones may embed extra images too, such as depth maps used for portrait mode.

See what your photo contains → PhotoSoap shows what it finds, then removes it.

Why it matters

The data itself is useful — it's how your gallery sorts photos by date and plots them on a map. The problem is what happens when you share the original file with people you don't know:

• A photo of your new couch on a marketplace listing can show where you live.
• A picture of your kids at the park can reveal which park, and what time you're usually there.
• A camera serial number can link photos you post anonymously to ones you post under your real name.

In one widely reported case from 2012, journalists published a photo of a man who was in hiding, and the GPS coordinates left in the image revealed which country he was in.

How to see it

Most photo apps have an "info" panel that shows some of it. For step-by-step instructions on iPhone, Android, Windows and Mac, see how to check if a photo has location data.

How to remove it

You can turn off location in your camera settings, or remove it per photo in your gallery app — see removing location on iPhone. To remove all metadata at once, PhotoSoap washes it off in your browser. Your photo is never uploaded, and the pixels aren't touched, so there's no loss in quality.

Is removing EXIF data safe for the photo?

Yes. PhotoSoap keeps the photo's colour profile and its rotation (so it doesn't end up sideways) and removes everything else. The picture looks exactly the same.