What is metadata, and what does your photo actually tell people?

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here is something that surprised me when I first looked into it properly. You take a photo on your phone. You turn off location access in Instagram before posting it. You think you covered your tracks.

But the photo file already has your GPS coordinates embedded in it. Right there, in the file. Instagram reads them from the file before it ever asks about location permissions.

That is metadata. And it is worth understanding.

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What is metadata, and what does your photo actually tell people?