Guides · 21 August 2026

Does converting an image remove its EXIF data?

Usually yes, and usually without telling you. What EXIF holds, which operations destroy it, why preserving it badly is worse than losing it, and how to decide which you want.

Usually yes, and usually without saying so. Most converters rebuild the picture from raw pixels, and the metadata was never part of the pixels — it is a separate block of data sitting alongside them, and rebuilding the image quietly leaves it behind.

Whether that is a loss or a relief depends entirely on what you are doing next, which is the part almost nobody tells you.

What is actually in there

The GPS line is the one worth pausing on. Phones record it by default, it is accurate to a few metres, and it survives being emailed, uploaded and re-shared. A photo taken at home carries your address in it.

What removes it

The pattern: anything that rewrites the pixels tends to drop it, and anything that just moves the file keeps it. Social networks are the exception that proves the point — they strip it on purpose, because hosting everyone’s home coordinates is a liability they do not want.

Why it happens

A converter decodes your file into a grid of coloured pixels, does whatever you asked, then hands those pixels to an encoder that writes a new file. The encoder is given pixels and nothing else. It has no idea what camera took them, and produces a file with no metadata because it was never handed any.

This is not laziness so much as the natural shape of the problem. Preserving metadata means deliberately carrying that block across, and — the part that catches people out — correcting it on the way.

Why preserving it badly is worse than losing it

Two fields in EXIF describe the file rather than the scene, and both become lies the moment the image is re-encoded.

Orientation is the dangerous one. Phones do not rotate the pixels when you turn the camera; they store the picture as the sensor saw it and add a tag saying “display this rotated 90°”. Every viewer reads the tag and turns the image.

Now convert that photo. The decoder reads the tag and applies it, so the pixels coming out are already upright. If the converter then copies the original EXIF across unchanged, the new file contains upright pixels and a tag saying rotate 90° — and every viewer dutifully rotates it again. You get a sideways photo, from a tool that was trying to be helpful.

A correct implementation resets that tag to 1. The pixels now are the orientation.

Dimensions are the quieter one. EXIF records the pixel width and height in up to four separate places. Resize the image without updating them and the file claims to be 4000 pixels wide while actually being 1000. Plenty of software trusts the tag over the image.

This is why “does it keep EXIF?” is a worse question than it sounds. Keeping it wrongly produces files that are visibly broken, and the tool looks fine right up until someone opens the photo.

The colour profile is a separate trap

Photos from modern phones are often in Display P3, a wider range of colour than the sRGB most software assumes. That is recorded as an ICC profile, not as EXIF.

Decoding usually converts the pixels to sRGB. Re-attaching the original P3 profile to sRGB pixels tells the viewer to interpret them as P3 — and every colour in the image shifts. Dropping the profile is the correct behaviour here even when preserving everything else, which is why “preserve all metadata” is not actually a coherent request.

So which do you want?

Strip it when the photo is going onto the internet, into a listing, onto a forum, or to anyone you do not know. The coordinates are the reason, and the file is a kilobyte or two smaller as a bonus.

Keep it when the photos are yours and staying yours: an archive, a backup, a folder you want to stay in date order, or work where the copyright field matters.

Keep it and then strip only the location if you want the dates and camera but not your address. GPS lives in its own sub-block, so it can be removed on its own without touching anything else.

Doing it here

BriskFile removes metadata by default on every conversion, resize and compression. Under the options there is a Keep the date, camera and settings tick box, which carries the EXIF across with the orientation reset and the dimensions corrected. It works from JPEG, PNG and HEIC sources, and writes into JPEG and PNG — WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL can all hold EXIF, but BriskFile does not write it into them yet.

To look at what a photo is carrying before deciding, the EXIF viewer reads it without changing anything. To remove it without converting, the metadata remover strips everything or just the coordinates.

Common questions

Does converting HEIC to JPG lose the date the photo was taken? With most converters, yes. The date lives in the HEIC’s metadata block, and rebuilding it as a JPEG leaves that block behind — which is why a folder of converted holiday photos often ends up sorted by conversion date rather than by when you took them.

Does resizing remove EXIF? Normally yes, for the same reason as converting: the image is decoded, resampled and re-encoded, and the encoder is handed pixels only.

Will stripping metadata make my file much smaller? No. EXIF is typically one to three kilobytes. Strip it for privacy, not for size — if the file is too big, the dimensions are almost always the reason.

Can EXIF be trusted? Not as evidence. Every field is just bytes and can be edited to say anything. It records what a camera claimed, which is not the same as what happened.

Does a screenshot of a photo have EXIF? Effectively no. You get a new image made by your device, with no camera data and no coordinates from the original. It is a crude way to strip metadata, at the cost of quality and of the real dimensions.

Do social networks remove it? Most do, on upload, including the coordinates. Do not rely on it — messaging apps and direct file transfers often do not, and “I sent it to one person” is exactly the case where the original file travels intact.