EXIF Privacy Checker
Phones tag photos with the exact spot they were taken. If you photograph stock at home, that spot is your address — and it travels with the image onto every marketplace that does not strip it. Drop a photo below to see what it is carrying.
🔒 Your data never leaves your browser. The photo is read here and never uploaded — which rather matters for a tool whose whole job is finding out whether your photos leak your location.
What a photo knows about you
EXIF is a block of metadata that cameras write into the file alongside the pixels. Most of it is harmless — exposure, focal length, which way up the picture goes. Some of it is not:
- GPS coordinates, accurate to a few metres. This is the one that matters. A seller photographing inventory in their living room is publishing their home address with every listing, and marketplaces vary wildly in whether they strip it.
- A camera or lens serial number, which is a stable identifier. It links every photo you have ever published to the same device, and therefore to each other — including the ones you posted under a different name.
- Your name, if the camera was ever set up with an owner or artist field.
- An embedded thumbnail, which is not always regenerated when a photo is edited. A stale one can still show the image before your crop, including whatever you cropped out.
Why there is no map link
Tools like this usually offer to open the coordinates in a map. This one does not, on purpose. Clicking that link would hand your location to a third party — the exact outcome you came here to check for. The coordinates are shown in both degrees-minutes-seconds and decimal; paste them wherever you like, knowingly.
Stripping is not re-encoding
The clean copy is built by rebuilding the file without its metadata segments. The compressed image data is copied across byte for byte, so there is no quality loss and no second round of JPEG artefacts. After stripping, the copy is re-checked here and the result is shown — a claim about your privacy should come with its own proof.
Rotation is a separate trap
Photos are often stored sideways with a flag saying which way to turn them. Browsers honour the flag; a surprising number of feed processors and marketplace pipelines do not, which is the usual reason a listing image appears rotated or badly cropped after upload even though it looked right on your phone.
Every check this tool runs (11 rules)
EXIF-G01GPS coordinates
The file records where the photograph was taken, to a precision of a few metres. For a seller photographing stock at home, that is a home address travelling with every listing image — and most marketplaces pass the file through without stripping it.
Fix: Re-export the image without metadata, or turn off location tagging in the camera app before the next shoot.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-G02GPS timestamp
A GPS date and time is recorded alongside the coordinates. Together they say not only where you were but when, which is more than a product photo needs to carry.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-P01Personal name
A name is stored in the artist, copyright or camera-owner field. If you trade under a business name, this is the field that quietly publishes your legal one.
Fix: Clear the owner and artist fields in the camera settings, or strip metadata on export.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-P02Device serial number
The camera body or lens serial number is recorded. It is a stable identifier: every photo you have ever published can be linked to the same device, and to each other, by anyone who cares to look.
Fix: Strip metadata on export. The serial cannot usually be turned off in the camera.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-D01Capture timestamp
The date and time the photograph was taken. Harmless on its own, but it dates your inventory — a listing photographed two years ago is visibly old stock.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-D02Camera and lens
Make, model and lens are recorded. Not sensitive by itself, though it does say something about the seller that some prefer not to advertise.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-S01Editing software
The software field names the tool that last wrote the file, and sometimes its version. It is a small fingerprint, and occasionally an embarrassing one.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-T01Embedded thumbnail
The file carries a small preview image alongside the full one. Thumbnails are not always regenerated when a photo is edited, so a stale one can still show the image BEFORE your crop — including whatever you cropped out.
Fix: Check the thumbnail, or strip metadata entirely, before publishing a cropped photo.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-O01Rotation stored as a flag
The image is not stored the way up it is meant to be shown; an orientation flag tells the viewer to rotate it. Marketplaces and feed processors that ignore the flag will display or crop your photo sideways, which is the usual explanation for "it looked fine on my phone".
Fix: Re-save the image already rotated, so the pixels themselves are the right way up.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-N01No metadata found
No EXIF block was found in this file.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
EXIF-F01Format not parsed
Metadata was not looked for in this container. This tool reads EXIF from JPEG and TIFF, which is where camera metadata almost always lives; other formats can carry it in ways this tool does not claim to understand.
Source: Derived from the TIFF/EXIF container layout itself — byte-order mark, IFD entry structure and tag numbering — which our tests verify against a real JPEG whose metadata was written and independently read back by an unrelated imaging library.
Metadata is read from JPEG and TIFF, which is where camera EXIF almost always lives. Other containers are named rather than silently reported as clean — "no metadata found" and "this tool did not look" are different answers, and conflating them would be the worst possible bug for a privacy tool.