A photograph taken on a phone is not only an image. Alongside the pixels sits a block of metadata called EXIF, written by the camera, and on a phone with location services enabled it includes the latitude and longitude where the shutter fired — typically to five decimal places, which is about a metre.
That block travels with the file. It is not visible when you look at the picture, and it survives being copied, renamed, backed up and emailed.
What is actually in there?
More than most people expect.
| Field | What it tells someone |
|---|---|
| GPS latitude and longitude | where the photo was taken |
| Date and time | when, to the second |
| Camera make and model | which phone or camera |
| Serial number | which individual device |
| Exposure, aperture, ISO | how it was shot |
| Orientation | which way up it should display |
The serial number is the one people never think about. Two photographs posted anonymously from the same camera can be linked to each other by it, which has been used in criminal cases and in unmasking anonymous accounts.
Does posting online strip it?
Usually, and not always, and the difference matters.
Facebook, Instagram, X and most large platforms re-encode every image on upload, which discards EXIF as a side effect. A photo posted there is generally safe.
What does not strip it: email attachments, cloud storage links, and messaging apps when you send "as a document" or "original quality" rather than as a compressed photo. Those deliver the file byte for byte, GPS and all. The option that preserves image quality is the same option that preserves your address.
Forums and self-hosted sites vary entirely, depending on whether whoever built the upload thought about it.
Why is the orientation tag its own problem?
Because a camera does not rotate the pixels. When you turn a phone sideways, the sensor still reads the same way — the camera records which way up it was in an EXIF tag and leaves the image data alone.
Software that reads the tag displays it correctly. Software that ignores it shows the photo on its side. That is why the same picture appears upright in one app and rotated in another, and why the fix is not to rotate the image but to make sure whatever is displaying it reads the tag.
Re-saving through an editor normally bakes the rotation into the pixels and drops the tag, which makes the orientation stick everywhere.
How do I check a specific file?
Read it. The block is plain data sitting in the file, and any tool that parses the APP1 segment can list it — the important thing is choosing one that does the reading on your own machine rather than uploading the photo to find out whether the photo is sensitive.
That is not a hypothetical concern. A site that reads EXIF by uploading has, by the time it answers, been given both the photograph and the coordinates you were asking about.
What about PNG and screenshots?
Screenshots have no camera metadata, because no camera was involved. They can carry a creation timestamp and the software that made them, and nothing about location.
PNG and WebP use different metadata containers from JPEG and are not normally where camera data ends up. If you have a photograph in PNG form, it has been converted at some point, and the conversion almost certainly dropped the EXIF.
Questions people ask
Can I turn it off at the source? Yes — every phone has a location setting for the camera specifically, separate from location services generally. Turning it off is the only fix that works retroactively for nothing and prospectively for everything.
Does cropping remove the GPS? No. Cropping changes pixels; the metadata block is untouched unless the software rewrites the file.
Is EXIF ever useful? Constantly. It is how photo libraries sort by date, group by location and let you filter by lens. The problem is not that it exists.
What about video? Video carries similar metadata in its own container. The same reasoning applies.
Check before you send. The EXIF viewer reads the block in your own browser without uploading anything, and if you want to know what a file will print at, the DPI checker and DPI converter read the density the same way.