What is EXIF data?

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is metadata written into the file at the moment of capture. A typical photograph from a phone carries:

• GPS coordinates — latitude and longitude, often to within a few metres.
• Date and time — when the photo was taken, to the second.
• Device make and model — and sometimes a camera serial number.
• Camera settings — aperture, shutter, ISO, focal length, whether the flash fired.
• Software — what edited the file, and when.

None of it is visible when you look at the image. All of it travels with the file.

For a landscape photograph you are publishing deliberately, the GPS data is often a feature.

It stops being a feature in some very ordinary situations. A photo taken at home and posted to a marketplace listing carries your home address. An image sent to a stranger carries where you were when you took it. A photo of a document taken at an office reveals the office. A leaked press image can be traced back to a specific camera by serial number.

The problem is not that this data exists; it is that almost nobody realises it is being shared.

Most large social platforms strip EXIF on upload — Facebook, Instagram, X and others remove it, partly for privacy and partly because they re-encode everything anyway.

But this only protects you on those platforms. Email attachments keep EXIF. Files uploaded to most content management systems keep it. Images shared through cloud storage links keep it. Anything you hand to a client directly keeps it.

Relying on the recipient's platform to strip it is not a strategy, because you do not control where the file ends up next.

Re-encoding an image removes EXIF as a side effect. When a tool decodes an image to raw pixels and encodes it again, only the pixels survive — the metadata block is not carried across.

This is what PixSqueeze does. Compressing an image here produces a file with no EXIF, no GPS and no camera information, because the output is written fresh from pixel data. You can confirm it by checking the file properties of the result: the location and camera fields will be empty.

If you need to keep the image bit-for-bit identical and only strip metadata, that is a different operation and needs a dedicated metadata tool.

Strip metadata from anything you send to a person rather than publish to a platform, and from anything at all connected to where you live or work. Keep it on your archived originals, where it is genuinely useful for organising and searching your own library.