What is EXIF metadata, and what does it reveal about you?

Metadata in plain terms

Every photo from a phone or camera carries information about itself alongside the pixels. The most common block is EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), written by the camera at the moment of capture. Editing apps add more in XMP, news and stock photo workflows use IPTC for captions and credits, and an ICC colour profile describes how to display the colours accurately.

What EXIF can contain

• GPS coordinates, often accurate to a few metres, plus altitude and sometimes the direction the camera was facing.
• The date and time of capture, sometimes with the time zone.
• Camera or phone make and model, lens, and settings such as exposure time, aperture, ISO and focal length.
• Serial numbers of the camera body or lens, on many dedicated cameras.
• The software used to edit the image, author and copyright fields, and a small embedded thumbnail.

Who can see it

Anyone who has the file. Large social networks typically strip most metadata, including location, from photos before showing them to others. Email attachments, cloud storage links, forums, chat apps that send photos as files and many websites pass the original file on untouched. Assume the full metadata travels with a photo unless you have removed it.

How to check a photo

Open it in the Metadata Viewer. It lists every EXIF, GPS, XMP, IPTC and ICC field it finds, shows the embedded thumbnail, and offers a map link for any coordinates. The file is read in your browser and nothing is uploaded. Opening the map link is a separate choice that shares only the coordinates with the map site.

The viewer shows what is present and says when a field is missing. It does not fill gaps with guesses.

How to remove or change it

• Remove Metadata strips EXIF, GPS, XMP, IPTC and comments. For JPG, PNG and WebP the metadata blocks are cut out of the file without re-encoding, so there is no quality loss. Other formats, such as HEIC, TIFF and AVIF, are re-encoded at high quality without metadata, and the result says so.
• Remove Location deletes only the GPS data and keeps camera details and dates.
• EXIF Editor changes individual fields in JPG files, for example to correct a wrong capture date or add a copyright notice.

Why the colour profile is kept

The ICC colour profile tells software how to display colours. Photos from recent iPhones and many cameras use wide-gamut profiles such as Display P3, and removing the profile can make colours look dull or shifted. A colour profile does not normally contain personal information, so Remove Metadata keeps it unless you choose otherwise.