What is hidden in your product photos, and what to strip

A photograph is not just pixels. Cameras and phones attach a substantial block of information to every file, and most people upload it without ever looking.

Some of it should go. One field must not, at least not before it has been applied.

What is actually in there

EXIF is the main block, written by the camera. Shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length, lens, camera model and serial number, the date and time, and, on phones and GPS-equipped cameras, the location.

IPTC is for editorial information: caption, creator, copyright, keywords. Usually added by a person or a cataloguing tool rather than the camera.

XMP is Adobe's format and often carries edit history: which adjustments were applied, in what order, sometimes including the name of the original file and the software licence holder.

The colour profile is technically metadata too, and it is the one that changes how the image looks.

What to strip, and why

GPS coordinates. The clearest case. If you photograph products at home, your listing images may carry your home address to metre precision. Phones embed this by default when location services are on for the camera. Strip it.

Camera serial numbers. These uniquely identify your camera body and can link photographs across accounts and platforms. Rarely a problem, occasionally a real one.

Timestamps. Not sensitive exactly, but they reveal when you photographed a product, which is sometimes commercially interesting: a launch date, or that a listing photo was taken two years ago.

Edit history. XMP can reveal software, licence details and the names of files on your machine.

Thumbnails. EXIF can embed a small preview. Here is the trap: some editing tools update the main image and leave the embedded thumbnail from before your edit. There have been real cases of the original, uncropped image surviving inside a cropped file.

The field you must not strip carelessly

Orientation.

If your photograph is a portrait image stored as a landscape rectangle plus an instruction to rotate it, and you delete the instruction without first rotating the pixels, the photograph is now permanently sideways. There is no record left of which way up it goes.

The correct order is: apply the rotation to the pixels, then strip the metadata. Every decent tool does this. Some quick "remove EXIF" utilities do not, and the result is an entire batch on its side.

The colour profile is not junk either

An ICC profile can be a few hundred bytes or several megabytes, and stripping it is a common "optimisation".

But the profile is what says whether the numbers in the file mean sRGB or something wider. Remove it from an sRGB file and most software assumes sRGB anyway, so nothing changes. Remove it from a Display P3 file and the colours will be read wrongly, duller, particularly in saturated reds.

So: convert to sRGB first, then strip the profile if you want to. Never strip it from a wide-gamut file.

How much space it takes

Worth a number, because "strip metadata to save space" is common advice and the saving is usually trivial.

A typical camera JPEG carries roughly 4KB to 20KB of EXIF. Add an embedded thumbnail and it can reach 30KB or more. An ICC profile is a few hundred bytes for a simple matrix profile like sRGB, but a large LUT-based profile can be 500KB to 2MB.

Against a 1.5MB product JPEG, stripping EXIF saves perhaps 1%. Stripping a large ICC profile can save 30%, and is the one case where the space argument is real, though as above, convert to sRGB before you do it.

So strip metadata for privacy, which is a good reason. Do not strip it for file size, which mostly is not.

What marketplaces do

Most strip metadata on upload as a matter of course. That is generally good for your privacy, and it means anything you were relying on is probably gone anyway, including copyright fields and keywords.

It also means the orientation tag is gone. Which is precisely why the rotation must be baked into the pixels before you upload, not left as an instruction for someone else to honour.

Checking a file

ExifTool is the standard tool and it is free:

exiftool photo.jpg              # everything
exiftool -gps:all photo.jpg     # just location
exiftool -all= photo.jpg        # strip everything, in place

That last command is the one to be careful with, for the orientation reason above.

If you would rather not install anything, most operating systems show a subset in file properties, and there are web-based viewers, though uploading a photograph to a website to find out whether it contains your address is a slightly self-defeating exercise.

A sensible policy

1. Shoot with location services off for the camera app. Prevention beats removal.
2. Rotate to upright as part of processing, so orientation is in the pixels.
3. Convert to sRGB deliberately.
4. Strip everything else on export.
5. Keep your masters with metadata intact, camera settings are genuinely useful when you need to match a shot months later.