What your phone writes into every photo
By default, most phones record the GPS coordinates of where each photo was taken — accurate to a few metres — directly inside the image file. Also the exact time, the device model, and on many cameras a serial number that ties every photo from that body together.
None of this is visible when you look at the picture. All of it travels with the file when you email it, put it in a shared folder, or send it to someone who asks for the original.
The practical consequence is easy to state: post a photo taken at home and you may have published your address. Sell something online with photos taken in your living room and the listing carries the coordinates. It is one of the quietest privacy leaks in everyday use, and almost nobody is ever told about it.
What social platforms do, and why it is not enough
Most large platforms strip EXIF when they re-encode an upload, so a photo posted to Instagram or Facebook generally does not carry its coordinates onward. That is real protection, and it is worth knowing it exists.
It is also incomplete. It does not cover email, messaging apps that send originals, cloud folders, marketplace listings, forums, or anywhere you hand over the file itself rather than posting it. And it is a policy, not a guarantee — it can change, and it says nothing about what the platform kept for itself before stripping.
Checking the file before it leaves your hands is the version of this that does not depend on anyone else’s behaviour.
Removing it is easier than you would think
Every tool on this site re-encodes images through a canvas, and that process discards all metadata as a side effect. You do not need a special "strip EXIF" step: any image that comes out of the Image Studio — resized, compressed, converted, reframed — is already clean.
This page just makes it explicit. Drop a photo, see what is in it, download a copy without it. The copy is pixel-for-pixel the same picture.
One thing worth being clear about: this reads the file, it does not change the original on your disk. And nothing is uploaded to do the reading, which for a tool whose entire purpose is "find out what this file reveals about me" is not a detail.