English
← Guides

Do WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram strip the location from your photos? What is known

The short answer: according to published tests, almost every network strips the metadata from the photo the other person sees when you send it the normal way; sending it as a file or document can keep it, and several companies say they read that data before stripping it. The long answer depends on the app, on how you send and on your phone, and there are gaps nobody has measured.

By

Two different questions

When you send a photo there are two things worth separating: what the other person receives and what the company keeps. A network can strip the GPS from the file the recipient sees and still read and store it first. This guide separates what the companies themselves document, what others have measured and what gets repeated without proof, which is a lot.

What the companies themselves say

  • Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Meta’s privacy policy, in force since 23 July 2026, lists among what it collects the content’s metadata, “like the location where a photo was taken or the date a file was created”. In other words: even if it shows it to no one, Meta says it reads your photos’ location. It does not apply to WhatsApp.
  • X. Its help centre says it uses a photo’s EXIF to suggest locations and for analytics, that it keeps it “temporarily” to process the photo, and that it is not available to those who view it.
  • Apple. The iPhone User Guide warns that sharing a photo includes its metadata: date, time, location and device. Apple’s Personal Safety guide explains how to avoid it: when sharing, “Options” and turn off “Location”. And “All Photos Data”, which only exists with AirDrop, sends the original with all its metadata.
  • Google Photos. Its help says the links, albums and conversations you share do not include location details by default, except with partner sharing, and that estimated locations are never shared.
  • Android and Samsung. Since Android 10, the system hides photo locations from apps that lack a specific permission to read them. And the Gallery on Samsung phones with One UI 3.0 or later has “Remove location data” when sharing.

What others have measured

Published tests with a method are few, and not recent. Programmer Scott Meyers found in January 2022 that WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Twitter stripped metadata when a photo was sent the normal way; that iMessage between Apple devices and email attachments kept it; and that AirDrop stripped it unless “All Photos Data” was on. The IPTC, the body that maintains the metadata standard for press photos, had seen in 2019 that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter stripped it from the downloaded image, and that Google Photos kept it in its owner’s own download.

An important caveat: both tests looked mainly at fields such as author, copyright or date, not specifically at GPS. And Signal confirms it in its own way: one of its developers explained in 2022 that the goal was to remove the location, not all EXIF.

What nobody has checked

Some much-searched questions have no solid published answer:

  • WhatsApp in HD. We have found neither documentation nor a test with a method on whether the HD photo keeps its metadata.
  • WhatsApp and Telegram “as a document” or “as a file”. They very likely send the file as it is, GPS included, because a document is not recompressed. But it is not documented, and it is not always so: in 2022 a user reported on Telegram’s bug tracker that, on Android, the GPS disappeared when sending as a file, while on iOS it was kept. The suggested cause is Android’s permission to read photo locations.
  • Instagram and X direct messages, and Discord. There are only claims from blogs without proof. Discord said in a 2018 tweet that it stripped “mostly” geolocation data.
  • What Meta keeps afterwards. That Meta collects the location is in its policy; exactly what it keeps and how it uses it is not.

Check it with your own photos

You do not need to trust anyone, this guide included. KillEXIF’s analysis runs in your browser and the photo never leaves your device, so you can use a real photo. With one of yours that has a location, you can check it in five minutes, with your phone and the version of the app you actually use:

  • See what it carries first. Drop the original photo onto KillEXIF. If it has coordinates, they will show under “Where you were”, with their map.
  • Send it to yourself. Send it through whichever app you like, to someone you trust or to a chat with yourself if the app allows it, and the way you usually do: normal, HD or as a document.
  • Save what arrives and look again. Download the received file without editing it and drop it onto KillEXIF too. If “Where you were” still shows up, the location travelled with the photo.
  • Repeat it now and then. Apps change, and what gets stripped today may stop being stripped after an update.

So what should you do

Not leave it to the app. What looks safe — sending the photo the normal way — usually strips the location from what the other person receives, but not from what the company sees, and a “send as document”, an email attachment, an iMessage or a cloud link is enough for the file to travel whole.

The reliable thing is for the photo not to carry the location before it leaves your phone or computer. On iPhone, by turning off “Location” in “Options” when sharing; on a Samsung, with “Remove location data”. And in any case, by cleaning it: KillEXIF does it in your browser, without uploading or re-encoding it, and then reads it back to check nothing is left.

Everything above comes from each company’s documentation and from tests published by third parties, and we give their dates because apps change. They are not our own measurements.