What Is Image Metadata? — Free, Fast & Private
An image file has two parts: the pixels, and a set of labelled fields describing them. Those fields are the metadata. Three standards are in common use, and they cover different jobs:
- EXIF — written by the camera. Make and model, lens, exposure, aperture, ISO, focal length, orientation, date and time, and on a phone almost always GPS coordinates.
- IPTC — written by people. Caption, credit, photographer, copyright, keywords. Its origins are in press photography, where the wire needed a caption attached to the picture.
- XMP — Adobe’s extensible format, used for editing history, ratings, colour profiles and anything a tool wants to record. It can carry copies of EXIF and IPTC fields inside itself.
The GPS field is the one to think about
A phone photograph taken with location services enabled records latitude and longitude to a precision of a few metres. Post that photo of your dog in the garden and, if the platform does not strip metadata, you have published your home address to anyone who opens the file properties.
Most large social platforms do strip EXIF on upload — but “most” is not “all”, and the exceptions are exactly the places people share files directly: email attachments, messaging apps that send “as a document”, cloud drive links, marketplace listings, forums and self-hosted sites. A second-hand furniture listing photographed at home is the classic case.
When metadata is worth keeping
It is not all liability. Copyright and credit fields travel with the file and are how a photographer’s claim survives a reposting. Timestamps matter for insurance claims and any dispute where when-was-this-taken is the question. Orientation is what stops a portrait photo displaying sideways. Keywords are how large archives stay searchable.
So the rule is not “always strip”. It is: keep the original with its metadata intact, and strip the copy you publish.
How to see what a file is carrying
On macOS, open the file in Preview and choose Tools → Show Inspector. On Windows, right-click → Properties → Details, which also offers “Remove Properties and Personal Information”. On a phone, the photo details panel usually shows a map if a location is attached — that map is your GPS field.
What compression does to it
When MiniPx compresses an image it decodes the pixels and encodes a new file from them. The result is a fresh image rather than your original with the quality lowered, so EXIF, IPTC and XMP from the source do not carry into it — including GPS. The output is written from the pixels as your browser decoded them, so what you saw in the preview is what you get.
That is a useful default for anything you are publishing, and an argument for keeping your originals when metadata is part of the value — a photography archive, or evidence.
If you only want the metadata gone and nothing else changed, the EXIF remover does exactly that without re-compressing the image. Worth noting: because this happens in your browser, the file is never uploaded in order to have its location data removed — which would be a slightly absurd way to protect your privacy.
A shorter, practical walk-through of what a single photo gives away is in the privacy write-up.