7 September 2026 · 5 min read

Does Google Photos Remove Metadata? (What It Keeps and Shares)

Does Google Photos remove metadata? It keeps EXIF and GPS intact. What it stores, what's shared when you send a link, and how to share photos cleanly.

Short answer: no — Google Photos is designed to keep your metadata, not strip it. That's the point of the product: it uses dates and locations to organise your library, build maps and surface memories. That's great for you and worth understanding before you share.

What Google Photos keeps

• GPS location, which powers the map view and place-based search.
• Date and time taken, used for timeline organisation.
• Camera and device details.
• Its own derived data — faces, objects and places it recognises in the image.

What happens when you share

Google has added controls here, including an option to hide location data in shared links and albums — worth checking in your sharing settings, since behaviour differs between a shared link, an album, and downloading the original file. The important thing to understand: if someone downloads the original from a share, they may get the original file with its metadata. And if you download a photo to send it through another app, that file carries everything.

When to clean it yourself

• Posting publicly — to a marketplace listing, forum, or social platform where you don't control the download path.
• Sending to someone you don't fully trust.
• Any photo taken at home, at a child's school, or anywhere you'd rather not pin on a map.

How to strip it

• Download the photo from Google Photos to your device.
• Drop it into Skrubly's Metadata Cleaner — it shows exactly what's embedded.
• Clean it and share that copy instead. It runs in your browser, so the photo is never uploaded to us.