Remove the hidden data from a photo before you publish it

Every photo carries more than the picture. A phone writes the coordinates it was taken at, the time, the device, and often the owner's name. A PDF carries the author, the software, and sometimes a trail of who edited it and when. None of it is visible, all of it travels with the file, and most people publishing a photo have no idea it is there.

The consequences are not theoretical and they are rarely dramatic. A team photo posted to a careers page with home coordinates on it, because somebody took it while working from their kitchen. A case study PDF whose author field names a client's employee who was never meant to be identified. A property listing that quietly announces where the photographer lives. Each is a small disclosure and each is completely avoidable.

The awkward part is that stripping is not universal. Some platforms remove metadata when you upload, some preserve it, and some remove it from the version they display while keeping the original available. Relying on the platform means relying on behaviour that is undocumented and can change. Removing it before the file leaves your machine means it is gone regardless of where the file ends up next.

There is a case for keeping metadata, and it is worth stating rather than assuming everything should be scrubbed. Copyright and attribution fields are metadata too, and a photographer stripping everything from their own work removes their claim to it along with the coordinates. The decision is about which fields, not whether. What matters is that it is a decision rather than an accident.

For PDFs the calculation is slightly different, because the risk is usually the edit history rather than the location. A document that has been through several hands can carry the names of all of them, and a document that was made by editing a previous client's version can carry a good deal more than that.

Everything runs in this page, which for this applet is not a preference but a requirement. A tool that removes location data from your photos by first uploading your photos and their location data would be an odd thing to build and an odder thing to use.