Your Photos Leak More Than You Think — Strip the Metadata

You photograph a couch, post it on a marketplace, and wait for offers. You've also just published the GPS coordinates of your living room, accurate to a few metres.

EXIF metadata carries coordinates, date and time, phone model, sometimes a serial number. In PDFs it's the author name, the machine name, and the full revision history.

When it actually bites

Marketplace listings. Rental photos. Screenshots dropped into a public ticket. A CV sent to ten companies. In every case the file travels to strangers — carrying more than you meant to send.

With PDFs the classic failure is the template filename: "proposal_client_ABC_v3.docx" sitting in the metadata of a document you just sent to a different client.

How to strip it

Open FileTools, upload the file, run the metadata cleaner. Processing happens locally in your browser, so the content never leaves your machine. You download a copy with no EXIF, no author, no revision trail.

It handles JPEG, PNG, HEIC and PDF. Batch mode takes a whole folder at once, which is the only sane way to clean thirty listing photos.

What to keep

You don't always want everything gone. Photographers usually keep exposure data and copyright fields and drop only the location. Pick what leaves — a blanket wipe isn't always the right answer.

Bottom line

Cleaning metadata takes ten seconds and prevents a problem most people notice far too late. Make it the last step before anything gets shared — FileTools does it in bulk, and it's a tidy way to prep stills for video work in TubeVoice too.