Privacy
A screenshot is a new file with its own metadata
Screenshotting a photo drops the original EXIF and writes fresh fields about your device and screen, which is less than before but not nothing.
Guides on Privacy: Who could see it, how, and what each path costs to close, Soft delete, backups, caches and logs, Sometimes, and the policy clause that says so is easy to miss
Mostly yes: a screenshot drops the camera's original metadata, including any GPS location. It does not produce a file with no metadata at all, because the screenshot is its own file, and the device taking it writes its own fields.
What gets dropped
The camera EXIF block - model, lens, exposure settings, timestamp of the original shot, and any GPS coordinates the camera wrote - does not survive a screenshot. Those fields are defined by the camera industry's Exif standard, maintained by CIPA and JEITA and revised as Exif 3.1 in January 2026, and they belong to the capture, not to the pixels. On an iPhone, Apple's own safety guide notes that the Camera app records location coordinates whenever Location Services is on for it, which is the field a screenshot most usefully drops. The screenshot process renders the image to the screen and captures pixels from there, which is a genuinely new act of image creation rather than a copy, so the whole inventory of camera-side fields simply has nothing to attach to. This is why a screenshot is the reliable fallback mentioned alongside the platform-specific steps in stripping EXIF before you upload: it works regardless of what the original file was carrying, without needing to know which fields to target.
What gets written instead
The device taking the screenshot writes its own metadata to the new file: the screenshot's own timestamp, the device model that captured it, and on some platforms basic details like screen resolution or colour profile. None of this is the same category of risk as the original camera data - it says something about the device viewing the photo, not the device that took it, and it carries none of the original timestamp or location. But it is not nothing, and "screenshot equals metadata-free" is an overstatement worth correcting. A serial number of the kind that some cameras write into MakerNotes does not carry over, since a screenshot has no MakerNotes block to inherit it from.
What it does to the image itself
Screenshotting also changes the pixels - it re-samples the image through the display and typically compresses the result again on save. That is a separate question from metadata, covered in detail in what changes when a screenshot is scored instead of the original file, and it is worth reading if the photo is headed to a rating tool rather than just being shared.
The practical takeaway
For metadata purposes specifically, a screenshot is a strong default: it reliably strips the fields that matter most, without requiring you to find the right menu on the right device. It is not a substitute for checking what the destination does with what remains - Rate Cock states its handling of uploaded images, which is the detail worth reading regardless of which file format you send. Whether you are sending a screenshot to a rating tool, to a human reviewer, or comparing how thoroughly different services disclose this kind of handling, the metadata question and the measurement question are unrelated - a screenshot changes neither what a fixed method would report nor anything about the subject itself.