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What your photo reveals: we checked 500 public photos
A photo file can carry details you can’t see in the picture. We checked 500 public photos: 70% had at least one of the details we looked for, and 13% still held a GPS location.
Updated October 31, 2026
What we found
We picked 500 JPEG files at random from Wikimedia Commons, a public image library, and checked whether seven kinds of hidden data (often called EXIF metadata) were still in each file. The second column covers the 298 files that named a camera or phone, which are the closest to ordinary photos.
| Detail in the file | All 500 files | 298 with a device named |
|---|---|---|
| Date and time taken | 339 (68%) | 297 (99.7%) |
| Camera or phone model | 298 (60%) | 298 (100%) |
| Software used | 293 (59%) | 258 (87%) |
| Lens | 82 (16%) | 82 (28%) |
| A person’s name or copyright owner | 76 (15%) | 65 (22%) |
| Device serial number | 69 (14%) | 69 (23%) |
| GPS location | 66 (13%) | 63 (21%) |
- Most files said something. 351 of the 500 had at least one of these details.
- Location wasn’t the most common detail. The date and device appeared far more often, so removing only the location can leave other details behind.
- Some details could point to a person or a device. 104 of the 298 had a name or a serial number. 20 of those also had a location.
What each detail can tell someone
- Location: where the photo was taken, sometimes close enough to identify a house. See what your photos reveal about your location.
- Date and time: when you were there. Together with a location, that can show a routine, such as when someone is home.
- Device and lens: what you used to take it.
- Serial number: an ID for a specific device. Someone could use it to connect photos taken on the same camera.
- Name or copyright owner: who took or owns the photo. Photographers often add this on purpose, but it’s easy to forget it’s there.
- Software: a program or firmware version that handled the file.
What to do before you share a photo
- Check it. Add it to the photo metadata viewer. It shows the location, camera, date and software, plus a count of the other details it found. The photo stays on your device.
- Remove what you don’t want to share. The viewer can remove all the hidden data without changing image quality. To remove only the location, useRemove photo location.
- Don’t rely on the website or app to do it. Some remove this data and some keep it, and it can depend on how you send the file. Removing it yourself first means you don’t have to know.
Remember what the picture itself shows, too. Removing hidden data won’t hide a street sign or a house number in the photo.
How we checked, and the limits
- Sample: 500 JPEG files from Wikimedia Commons, uploaded between January 2015 and July 2026, drawn from random points in the upload history on October 31, 2026. Up to three files were taken from each point, so some may come from the same batch.
- Method: we read the metadata Wikimedia reports for each file and recorded only yes or no for each detail. We didn’t record or publish any location, name or serial number.
- Not typical of everyday sharing: people upload to this library on purpose, the files include scans and historical images, and photographers may keep some details deliberately. These numbers don’t show how often your own photos, or photos on other sites, contain this data.
- A detail being present doesn’t mean a problem: we didn’t check whether any file exposed anything private.
- Could undercount: we only looked for these field names, so a device serial number stored under another name wouldn’t be counted.
Get the data
Download the results (CSV): yes or no for each detail in each file, with a link to each file’s page. Free to reuse; please link to this page if you cite it.