Metadata
What a photo says about you
The part of a photograph that is not the photograph, what is usually in it, and why saving a covered copy here removes all of it whether you wanted that or not.
The block nobody looks at
Almost every photograph from a phone or a camera carries an EXIF block: a run of structured fields written by the device at the moment of capture and carried along afterwards by anything that copies the file without re-encoding it. It was designed to be useful — it is how a photo library sorts by date, orients a portrait correctly and shows a map of a holiday.
The same block that lets your own phone put a holiday on a map lets anybody else do the same thing with a file you sent them.
What is usually in there
| Field | What it says | How specific |
|---|---|---|
| GPS latitude and longitude | Where the shutter was pressed | Typically within a few metres |
| Capture time | The date and the time of day, often with a timezone offset | To the second |
| Camera make and model | Which device took it | Exact model |
| Lens and settings | Focal length, aperture, exposure, ISO | Exact |
| Serial numbers | On some cameras, the body and lens serials | Uniquely identifying |
| Orientation | Which way up the picture should be displayed | One of eight values |
| Software | What last edited it, and sometimes when | Exact |
Not every file carries every field, and some platforms strip some of them on upload — unevenly, without telling you, and differently this year from last. That inconsistency is the reason this is worth handling yourself rather than assuming somebody downstream did it.
What happens when you save a copy here
The covered copy is not your file with some fields deleted. It is a new picture, drawn pixel by pixel into a blank canvas and then encoded, so there is no place for an EXIF block to come from. Everything in the table above is gone from the file you get:
- The GPS coordinates, and with them anything derived from them.
- The capture date and time.
- The camera and lens, their settings and any serial numbers.
- The software history.
- The orientation flag — but this one is different, and it is worth knowing why.
Orientation is applied to the actual pixels when the picture is opened here, before the tool sees it and before you draw anything. So it is not lost, it is baked: the copy you save is upright in its own right rather than upright because of a flag somebody else has to honour. That also means a region you draw is where you drew it, on every screen.
What is still in the picture after all that
Removing the metadata does not make a photograph anonymous, and it would be dishonest to let that impression stand. What remains is everything visible: the buildings, the street furniture, the number on a door, the view from a window, the weather, the shadows and their angle, a reflection in a window or a pair of glasses, a screen in the background, a uniform, a lanyard, a car.
All of that is the visible frame, which is the part this tool is for. Draw over what matters, check the saved file, and read which covering to use before you decide a soft one will do.
The tool this was written for is on the front page.