People who sell a used item or list a room often photograph it at home. If the photo’s location tag survives upload, a stranger can see the street you live on. Many platforms strip location from the images they show, but not all of them, and not from files you send directly to a buyer.
What can leak
- The GPS position of the photo, accurate to a few metres.
- The date and time, which shows when you are usually home.
- The phone model, which tells a thief what you own.
- Photos sent in messages as files, which keep every tag.
Do this before you list
- Turn off location for the camera app, or use the share sheet’s location switch on iPhone.
- Take the pictures, then clean them: Image Metadata Remover for JPEG, PNG and WebP, HEIC Metadata Remover for iPhone HEIC files. You can drop many photos at once.
- Check one cleaned photo in the EXIF Viewer: there should be no GPS section.
- Upload the cleaned copies.
Also look at what is in the picture
Metadata is only part of the story. A house number, a street sign, a package label, a view from a window or a reflection can reveal a location too. Crop or blur them.
When a buyer asks for more photos
Photos you send in a chat or by email are often delivered as the original file. Clean them first, the same way, so the extra pictures do not carry the details you were careful to hide on the listing.