Before you post a photo

1What a photo carries

Besides the pixels, a photo file has labels: EXIF, XMP and IPTC. Most are harmless (the exposure, the lens), but some say more than you meant to:

• The place: GPS coordinates, often with altitude and even the direction the camera faced.
• The camera: the phone or camera model, sometimes the serial number of the camera and the lens. A serial number connects every photo from that camera.
• Names: the camera owner or the author, if someone once typed them into the settings.
• Hidden extras: a small preview stored inside the file (an editor may not update it after a crop), the video of a “live” photo, and in PNG files from image generators, the whole prompt.

2PhotoBench: see it

Open PhotoBench and drag photos onto the page or press Choose photos, up to 300 at a time. Nothing is uploaded: the browser opens the files and reads them in memory. The Metadata tab starts with a short summary of the risks: Exact location, Serial number, Author or owner name, Phone or camera model, Hidden preview image and Attached video, followed by every tag for the curious.

It reads JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, and the metadata of HEIC and AVIF too, even where the browser can’t show the picture itself.

3WhereBench: where exactly

The Location tab in PhotoBench shows the coordinates, the altitude, the direction and the GPS time. The small map appears only after Show on the map, because the map tiles come from OpenStreetMap, and its server sees which area you are looking at. Open in WhereBench puts the point on a full map, with the file name as the address and the time it was taken.

This is the scary part, and it’s useful to see it once: not “somewhere in the city”, but the building, often the side of it.

4Cut it off

On the Remove data tab, choose What to remove:

• All metadata: the place, the camera and serial numbers, the date, the author, programs, hidden previews, attached videos and text notes. The picture itself is not touched.
• Only the location: GPS and place names go, the camera, date and settings stay. Handy for photos you want to keep sorted by date.

Keep rotation leaves the one tag that tells which way is up, so the sofa doesn’t lie on its side, and Keep colour profile keeps the colours as they were. JPEG, PNG and WebP are cleaned without recompressing, so the quality does not drop by a single pixel. Then PhotoBench reads the cleaned file again and says Checked: clean. Download all (ZIP) or, on a phone, Share or save to Photos.

5When it matters

Many social networks remove these labels themselves when they recompress a photo. But not every path does: a photo sent as a file, attached to an email or shared through a cloud link usually arrives exactly as it left your phone, labels included. Clean it first when:

• you sell something from home, or post the view from your window;
• you send a photo “as a file” so it keeps its quality;
• you publish photos of children, or of a place you would rather not name;
• you are not sure where the photo will end up.

On an iPhone you can also leave out the location when sharing: Options at the top of the share sheet, then turn off Location. It removes only the place, though; the rest stays.