What photos give away
A photo taken on a phone usually carries an EXIF record alongside the picture. It commonly includes the GPS coordinates of where the shutter was pressed, accurate to a few metres, along with the make and model of the device and the exact second it was taken.
That travels with the file. Sent in a message, attached to an email, or uploaded to a forum or marketplace listing, it goes along too. Some large social networks strip it on upload, but plenty of sites do not, and nothing strips it from a file you send directly.
Why the coordinates matter
A photo of something for sale, taken at home, carries your address. A picture posted anonymously carries the place it was taken. This is a well-worn way for people to be located without realising they shared anything at all.
What this does
- Shows you exactly what is in the file, including the coordinates on a map
- Removes EXIF, XMP, IPTC and comment data
- Keeps the colour profile, so colours do not shift
- Does not re-encode — the image data is copied across untouched, so nothing is lost to a second round of compression
The exception is a photo whose orientation is stored as a tag rather than in the pixels. Removing that tag would leave the picture sideways, so in that one case the rotation is applied to the pixels and the file is re-saved. You are told when this happens.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Once the page has loaded there is no network involved at all — you can turn off your connection and it still works, because the entire thing runs in your browser.