Your photos carry your address inside them: how to wipe it before sharing
If you post a photo taken at home without touching it, you are publishing your home coordinates accurate to a few metres. Almost nobody knows this.
3 minute read
What a photo actually stores
EXIF data travels inside the file, invisible when you look at the image. A photo from an ordinary phone usually contains:
- GPS coordinates of the exact spot it was taken, accurate to a few metres.
- Date and time to the second.
- Make and model of the phone or camera, and sometimes its serial number.
- Technical settings: aperture, ISO, whether the flash fired.
- Orientation and, in some cases, a thumbnail of the original image before you edited it.
When it genuinely matters
- Selling something second-hand with photos taken at home.
- Posting on forums, social networks or property listings.
- Sending photos to someone you do not know in person.
- Uploading images of children anywhere.
The large social networks usually strip EXIF on upload, but not all of them do, and email, forums and messaging apps that send the original file certainly do not.
How to wipe it
Open the remove metadata tool and drag your photos in.
Press Strip metadata. The image is rebuilt copying only the pixels, so no embedded data reaches the copy.
Download the clean version and share that one, not the original.
How to avoid it from the start
On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never. On Android: open the Camera, go into its settings and turn off location tags. You lose the map of your photos in the gallery, which for many people is a fair trade.