Metadata guide
What is image metadata?
Image metadata is information stored alongside the encoded picture. It can describe how, when and where a file was created—even though none of it is visible in the photograph.
What a photo can contain
A phone or camera may record its make and model, exposure settings, lens, capture time and orientation in EXIF. If location services were enabled, the same EXIF structure can contain latitude, longitude and altitude.
Editing and publishing tools often add XMP or IPTC records. Those may contain an author, copyright notice, caption, keywords, software name or editing history. PNG text chunks and image-generator workflows can also hold prompts, seeds, model names and other parameters — the subject of PNG text chunks and AI generation metadata.
EXIF, IPTC and XMP compared
The three standards overlap, which is why one file often carries all of them.
| Standard | Written by | Typically holds | | --- | --- | --- | | EXIF | Cameras and phones | Make, model, exposure, lens, capture time, orientation, GPS | | IPTC | Publishing and newsroom tools | Caption, credit, headline, keywords, usage terms | | XMP | Adobe and modern editors | Author, copyright, edit history, ratings, the same descriptive fields as IPTC |
EXIF is the one that usually matters for privacy, because it is the only one of the three that routinely records where you were standing. You can see which of them a given file carries with the metadata viewer.
Metadata is not the image
JPEG, PNG and WebP files are containers. Their metadata generally sits in segments or chunks around the compressed image payload. A careful cleaner can remove supported metadata blocks while copying the encoded picture unchanged.
Color profiles and orientation deserve special treatment. They can affect how an image looks, so MetaPurify preserves them by default rather than treating every non-pixel byte as dangerous.
What removal cannot do
Removing metadata cannot hide a visible landmark, undo information already stored by a social platform or remove a watermark encoded into pixels. It also cannot prove or disprove that an image was AI-generated.
Nor does it help if the platform already has the original: uploading first and cleaning later changes nothing about what was received. Which platforms strip image metadata covers what actually happens to a file after you post it.
The useful question is narrower: what information is attached to this file, and do you want to share it?
Common questions
What is the difference between EXIF, IPTC and XMP?
EXIF is written by the camera and holds capture data such as exposure, orientation and GPS coordinates. IPTC is an older publishing standard for captions, credits and keywords. XMP is Adobe's XML-based format that modern editors use for much the same descriptive information, which is why a single file often carries two or three of them at once.
Can someone recover metadata after it has been removed?
Not from the cleaned file. Once the metadata segments are gone from the copy you saved, there is nothing in those bytes to recover. The original file still has everything, so the copy you share is the one that matters.
Does converting an image to another format remove its metadata?
Sometimes, and unpredictably. Some converters copy EXIF across into the new file, some drop it and some keep part of it. Converting is not a reliable way to strip metadata, which is why it is worth checking the result rather than assuming.
Can someone find my address from a photo?
If the photo still carries GPS coordinates, yes, that is exactly what those fields are for. A picture taken at home with location services on records the location to within a few metres, and anyone who receives the file can read it.