How Every Major Platform Strips Your Image Metadata
A systematic study of metadata preservation across 12 platforms — Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Discord, Reddit, Imgur, Pinterest, Tumblr, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.
The Metadata Problem
EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata is the traditional method for establishing image provenance. But what happens when you share an image? We tested 12 major platforms to find out exactly what metadata survives the upload/download cycle.
Test Setup
We created a test image with comprehensive metadata: EXIF (camera model, GPS, date, artist, copyright), IPTC (headline, caption, byline, keywords), and XMP (creator, rights, description). We uploaded to each platform and downloaded the result.
Results: The Metadata Wasteland
11 out of 12 platforms stripped ALL EXIF data. 12 out of 12 stripped IPTC data completely. Only Telegram preserved some EXIF fields (camera model, date). No platform preserved copyright or creator information. GPS data was stripped by every single platform — the one case where metadata stripping is actually beneficial for privacy.
What This Means for Creators
If you rely on metadata for image provenance, your attribution is destroyed the moment someone shares your work on social media. This is not a bug — platforms strip metadata intentionally for privacy, storage, and performance reasons. Pixel-level watermarking is the only approach that survives this processing pipeline.
Platform-by-Platform Breakdown
Twitter/X: Strips all metadata, recompresses to Q85, caps at 4096px. Facebook: Strips all metadata, recompresses Q80-Q85, applies content-adaptive quality. Instagram: Strips everything, Q75-Q85, caps at 1080px. LinkedIn: Strips metadata, minimal recompression. Discord: Strips EXIF GPS/artist, preserves some camera data for images under 8MB, compresses larger files.
Reproduce this experiment
Seal your own image and verify it after applying transforms. The same tools we used are available to you right now.