That Marketplace Sofa Photo Came With My GPS Coordinates: Six Free Metadata Scrubbers, Honestly Tried
Photo: Svln4821, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I bought a used sofa off Facebook Marketplace in 2026. The seller sent a photo of it. I downloaded the image, opened it in a metadata viewer, and found the GPS coordinates for their apartment complex. Nothing creepy intended. Phone cameras do this by default. That was the moment I stopped treating photo metadata as a nerdy detail and started treating it as a sharing problem.
Most people never see this stuff. Your camera roll stores EXIF and XMP data: capture time, orientation, device make and model, sometimes a serial number, editing app history, and latitude/longitude. Social networks often strip some of it, but email attachments, cloud links, marketplace uploads, and direct messages are less predictable. If you are sending photos to a stranger, a client, or a school group, you should know what is riding along.
So I built a test batch. Seventy-two photos: 30 from an iPhone, 20 from an Android phone, 12 from an older Canon DSLR, and 10 screenshots. I copied them into six folders, ran one free scrubber per folder, and checked before and after with ExifTool. I looked for GPS, DateTimeOriginal, Orientation, camera serial, and software tags. I also opened every output file to see if it still looked right.
The short version
| Tool | Platform | What it did | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| ExifTool | Windows, macOS, Linux | Removes exactly what you tell it to | Command line; not a casual drag-and-drop app |
| ExifCleaner | Windows, macOS, Linux | Stripped all metadata in one drop | Also killed capture dates and orientation |
| XnConvert | Windows, macOS, Linux | Batch conversion with metadata controls | Busy interface; easy to strip too much |
| IrfanView | Windows | Batch processing and format changes | Metadata handling is fiddly; not my first privacy pick |
| JPEG & PNG Stripper | Windows | Removed all metadata fast | Dated UI, no preview, no undo |
| ImageOptim | macOS | Stripped metadata during optimization | Mac only; not a Windows answer |
What actually happened to GPS
Every all-purpose stripper removed GPS coordinates. That part was easy. ExifTool removed GPS only when I asked it to, which is the point: it is a scalpel, not a shredder. ExifCleaner, JPEG & PNG Stripper, and ImageOptim were closer to shredders. They cleaned the file, but they also took the useful stuff with it.
The useful stuff matters more than people think. If you strip DateTimeOriginal, Windows may fall back to the file modified date when sorting. Your 2019 vacation folder suddenly looks like it happened last Tuesday. If you strip Orientation, some viewers show the photo sideways because the pixels were never rotated. The tag was doing the rotating. That happened in my batch with two tools, and it is exactly the kind of thing you notice only after you have already shared the album.
The date-and-orientation problem
This is the trade-off nobody mentions in the app store listings: privacy scrubbing and archive-friendly metadata are not the same job. If you want to keep dates and orientation but remove location, you need a tool that lets you remove selected tags. ExifTool is the reliable free option. A simple command like exiftool -gps:all= -overwrite_original *.jpg strips GPS from a folder of JPEGs while leaving the capture date and orientation alone in most normal cases. Test on copies first, and check a few files afterward. You can verify with exiftool -GPS:all -DateTimeOriginal -Orientation photo.jpg.
If you just need to post one photo to a marketplace listing and you do not care about the original date, a drag-and-drop scrubber is fine. If you are cleaning a family archive before sharing it with relatives, do not nuke every tag. You will regret it when the timeline turns to mush.
The six tools, honestly
ExifTool is the one I trust most and recommend least to beginners. It is free, it is powerful, and it will do exactly what you type. That is also the danger. Read the docs, work on copies, and verify.
ExifCleaner is the easiest recommendation for a quick, total scrub. Drag files in, let it run, done. Just know that it removes the good metadata too. For a single marketplace photo, that is a fair trade.
XnConvert is a batch converter first and a metadata tool second. It can strip EXIF and resize in the same pass, which is handy for forums and email. The interface is not friendly, and I had to double-check the metadata output before trusting it.
IrfanView remains a great free image viewer. For metadata scrubbing, it is workable but not elegant. I would use it for format conversion and basic edits, not as my privacy tool.
JPEG & PNG Stripper is old-school: tiny, fast, ugly. It stripped everything and asked no questions. For one-off files on a Windows PC, that can be enough. There is no preview and no undo, so keep originals.
ImageOptim is excellent if you are on a Mac, but it is not a Windows solution. I include it because half the people who ask me about this are on Macs, and it does the job while shrinking file size.
The workflow I would actually use
- Copy the photos to a working folder. Never scrub the only copy.
- For casual sharing, use ExifCleaner or JPEG & PNG Stripper on the copies.
- For batches where dates matter, use ExifTool to remove GPS only.
- Check three files with a metadata viewer before sending the whole folder.
- Look at orientation in a normal photo viewer, not just a thumbnail.
- Remember that screenshots usually have no GPS, but they can still carry software and timestamp tags.
The bigger lesson: do not assume the app will protect you. Some social platforms strip metadata on upload; many do not strip everything, and direct file transfers usually pass it through. If a photo is going to a stranger, a client, or a public listing, spend the extra minute. Your camera roll knows more about you than you think.
