What your photo carries

What is in there

Cameras and phones write a block of information into the file alongside the picture, called EXIF. Typically it holds the date and time the shutter opened, the make and model of the camera, the lens, the exposure settings, which way up the picture should be shown, and — if location was on — the latitude and longitude, often to within a few metres of your front door.

None of this is visible in the picture. It travels with the file, and most upload forms, messaging apps and websites receive it without mentioning it.

What a conversion here keeps

A converted JPG is rebuilt from the decoded pixels rather than copied, so nothing carries over by accident. The fields written into it are these, and only these:

• The date and time the photo was taken, exactly as the camera recorded it.
• The camera make and model.
• The location, when the original had one and you asked to keep it.
• The right way up. Rotation is baked into the pixels themselves and the orientation flag is set to “upright”, so the photo cannot come out sideways in software that ignores the flag.

I verified this by converting a photo that genuinely carries all of it, downloading the result, and reading the downloaded file back. Checking the panel on screen would not have proved anything: it shows what was parsed from the source, which is a different file.

What the panel shows but the file does not keep

The Details panel reads far more than the converter writes. The lens, the shutter speed, the aperture, the ISO, the altitude, the compass direction and any authorship fields are displayed from your original and are not carried into the JPG.

That gap is worth stating plainly, because an interface that shows a field implies it is being looked after. It is not. If those fields matter to you, keep the original file — the converted copy is not a replacement for it.

It is also a choice rather than a limitation, and it is fair to know the alternative: converting the same photo with macOS’s own export carries all of those fields across. I write the four that people notice missing and leave the rest, because the JPG is rebuilt from the picture rather than copied. If you want the full set, convert on a Mac; if you want the photo to travel light, this is the shorter list on purpose.

PNG and PDF carry none of it

PNG has no EXIF block, so a photo converted to PNG loses the date, the camera and the location entirely. That is the format, not a choice I made. The same is true of the images placed inside a PDF. Both pages say so before you convert rather than after.

If you want the picture without the information, this is one way to get it — though the option below is the deliberate one.

Sending a photo that carries less

After converting, three options sit above the results:

• Keep — the date, camera and location travel with the photo.
• Drop location — the coordinates are removed and everything else stays. This is the one to use before posting a photo of something near where you live.
• Remove all — the information block is removed outright, leaving a file that says nothing about when, where or on what it was taken.

Switching between them rewrites the file’s information and never touches the picture, so it is instant and costs no quality. All three were checked by reading the finished files back off disk, including the case that is easiest to get wrong: a privacy control tested on a photo with no location to remove passes forever without doing anything.

The one place I refuse to guess

Coordinates of exactly 0°, 0° are treated as no location at all. That point is in the Atlantic off West Africa, and photographs are not taken there — but some systems blank out a photo’s location by setting the coordinates to zero rather than deleting them. Android’s photo picker does exactly that.

Reading those zeros as a real place would stamp a false location onto every photo converted on a phone while the page reported the location preserved. So nothing is written instead. The honest cost: a photo genuinely taken at that spot in the ocean loses its coordinates here. A plausible wrong place is worse than no place.

What compressing does to it

Compressing an image keeps the same fields, inside whatever size you asked for. The same three options apply, so you can shrink a photo for an upload form and strip its location in the same pass.

Wondering about the format itself rather than what it carries? What is a HEIC file? explains it. Trying to get a HEIC open in the first place? Opening a HEIC file.