September 7, 2026 · 5 min read

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

Google Photos stores your images with their metadata intact — including GPS. Here's what it keeps, what gets shared when you send a link, and how to share 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.