Crop, filter, export - and the EXIF is often still there

No, editing a photo does not reliably strip its metadata. Most editors are built for photographers who want camera settings, copyright and sometimes location kept, so they carry it forward through every crop, filter and export.

An edited file feels like a fresh version, which is a reasonable thing to assume and the wrong one: on that basis alone it is no cleaner than the original.

Why editors default to keeping it

Metadata preservation is a professional feature, not an oversight. A photographer exporting a batch wants the lens data intact for their archive, and a stock photography workflow depends on the copyright and author fields surviving every processing step. The IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, which its maintainers call the most widely used standard thanks to "its universal acceptance among photographers, distributors, news organizations, archivists, and developers," exists to keep exactly those fields attached to an image as it moves. Consumer photo apps inherited these defaults from professional tools rather than designing fresh ones, so the same "keep everything unless told otherwise" behaviour shows up in apps nobody would call professional. Some go further: certain editors add a field recording their own name and the edit history, which means an edited photo can carry more identifying metadata than the original, not less. None of this is malicious design. It reflects who the software was originally built for - a working photographer wants provenance to survive, a client wants proof of authorship, and an archive wants every field intact for later. Those are reasonable priorities for the audience the tool was designed around, and they simply are not your priorities when the photo in question is one you would rather not have traced back to you.

What actually happens, by category

Crop and rotate tools in most mobile gallery apps preserve EXIF through the operation, including GPS, unless the app specifically strips location as a separate step - which is a distinct toggle from the crop itself, easy to miss. On an iPhone, for example, Apple's own guide puts that toggle in the share sheet: tap Options, turn off Location, and "Location Not Included" appears.

Filter and preset apps generally preserve the source metadata and add their own processing tags describing which filter was applied and by which software, which is a new identifying string rather than a removed one.

Desktop editors with a "Save a Copy" or "Export" dialog often expose a metadata option explicitly - a checkbox or dropdown for "include EXIF" or a strip level - buried in export settings rather than the main save flow, so it is easy to export repeatedly without ever seeing it.

Screenshotting the edited result, as covered elsewhere, drops the original camera EXIF but writes fresh metadata about the device and app that took the screenshot - a different, smaller set of fields, not zero.

How to know which category you are in

The only reliable answer is to check the exported file rather than assume from the app's category. How to read a photo's metadata before you upload it walks through the inspection step in general, and it is the same step regardless of whether the file came straight from the camera or through three rounds of editing. If the export still carries what you expected it to lose, stripping EXIF as a separate final step after editing is finished is the reliable fix, rather than trusting any particular editor's defaults.

Why this is worth doing before scoring, not after

None of this changes a score. A rating model reads pixels, and editing tools that reshape or smooth a photo affect what the model sees for reasons that have nothing to do with metadata - beauty filters and their effect on a result are their own subject, and the metadata question sits entirely apart from it. What editing does change is what travels with the file once it leaves your device: a submission photo prepared for repeat comparison should be clean on both fronts, and Penis Rater's notes on preparing a submission address the comparison side of that. A file sent to a human judge rather than a model carries the same residual fields, and what belongs in a submission for a human review is a related but separate set of habits. None of this touches a measurement taken by hand - Measure My Cock's method is a tape and a technique, not a file that passes through an editor at all.

Treat "edited" and "clean" as two separate claims about a file, because the software you used has every reason to keep them separate too.