Privacy

Strip EXIF before you upload anything

Your camera writes your location into the file. Removing it is quick, permanent, and worth doing before any upload rather than after.

3 min readPrivacy

Every photo your phone takes carries EXIF metadata: the camera model, the exact date and time to the second, the exposure settings, and on most devices by default, the GPS coordinates where it was taken.

For a photo you are uploading to a rating tool, none of that is needed by anything. The same goes for a photo sent to a human judge - the etiquette of what to send is another matter, but the metadata is never part of it. It is pure downside, and removing it takes seconds.

iPhone

In Photos, open the image, tap the info button (or swipe up), and if there is a location line, tap Adjust then No Location. That removes the coordinates from the copy that gets shared.

To strip everything rather than just location, share the photo to yourself using Options → Send as → Individual Photo with All Photos Data turned off, or take a screenshot of the image and upload the screenshot. The screenshot trick is crude and it works: a screenshot carries no camera EXIF at all.

To stop it happening in future: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never.

Android

Open the photo in Google Photos, swipe up for details, and use Remove location where it is offered. Coverage varies by manufacturer and version, so verify rather than assume.

Alternatively, the Files app on most builds shows a photo's details and allows clearing location. Same fallback as above: a screenshot is metadata-free.

To stop it at source, open the camera app's settings and turn off Location tags or Save location - the wording differs by manufacturer.

macOS

Preview: Tools → Show Inspector → (i) → GPS → Remove Location Info.

Or, for everything at once, in Terminal:

mogrify -strip photo.jpg

mogrify ships with ImageMagick and -strip removes all profiles and comments. It edits in place, so work on a copy.

Windows

Right-click the file, Properties → Details → Remove Properties and Personal Information, then choose Create a copy with all possible properties removed. This is built in and needs no software.

Verify it worked

Do not trust the step, check the result. On macOS, mdls photo.jpg | grep -i gps returns nothing when the location is gone. Cross-platform, exiftool photo.jpg lists everything that remains. Various web-based EXIF viewers do the same, though uploading a file to a metadata site to check whether it has metadata is a slightly circular thing to do.

Does it matter if the service strips it anyway?

Most reputable services strip EXIF on ingest. The reasoning for doing it yourself regardless is straightforward: you are relying on a claim you cannot verify, the file transits at least one network and usually one third-party processor before that stripping happens, and the cost of doing it yourself is ten seconds.

It is the cheapest item on the entire list of things worth checking before you upload anything, and unlike the rest of that list it does not require reading anybody's privacy policy.

Worth adding: stripping metadata does not affect a rating. Models score pixels, and the pixels are all they ever see - the EXIF block is not part of the input. Nor is anything about size in the real world - that comes from a tape, not a file - so you lose nothing in the result by removing it. If you are trying to make one submission comparable with the next, Penis Rater's notes on standardising a submission are where the effort actually pays off.

Services vary a great deal on the handling side of this, and the ones worth using tend to say so plainly; Rate Cock documents its media handling rather than leaving it implied, which is the minimum bar and a lower bar than it should be.

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