Remove metadata from a screenshot
Drop a screenshot below to see what it contains and download a clean copy. Screenshots carry no GPS or camera data, but usually do carry a timestamp, a display colour profile and the software that made them.
Nothing is uploaded. The inspector runs in a frame that the browser blocks from opening any network connection at all.
What is really in a screenshot
Less than the internet implies. No camera took the picture, so the fields that make camera photos sensitive — coordinates, make and model, body serial number, lens — are simply not written. What remains is mundane:
| Typically present | What it tells someone |
|---|---|
| Creation timestamp | When you took it, sometimes to the second |
| Colour profile | Roughly which display or device |
| Pixel dimensions | Your screen resolution and scaling |
| Software or OS version | What you run, and how current it is |
| Capture tool name | Which utility you use |
None of that is a home address. It is worth removing when you are posting anonymously, where a timestamp or an OS version is one more thread to pull, and it is close to irrelevant otherwise. Drop yours in above rather than trusting this list — different tools write different things.
The part stripping metadata will not fix
The risk in a screenshot is nearly always in the picture, not the file.A screenshot records the screen: the notification that arrived mid-capture, the other browser tabs, the filename in the title bar, the account name in the corner, the edge of a window behind the one you meant to capture.
Removing metadata does nothing about any of it. Crop tightly, and look at the whole image before posting — that habit is worth more than this tool is.
Screenshots are usually PNG
Which matters, because PNG metadata does not live in EXIF. It lives in text chunks, and editors write into them freely — generator strings, comments, XMP packets from an annotation tool. If you have annotated or cropped a screenshot before posting it, the editing app has probably left its name in the file.
See removing metadata from a PNG for how those chunks work.
Questions
- Do screenshots contain metadata?
- Some, but much less than a camera photo. A screenshot has no GPS coordinates, no camera model and no lens data, because no camera was involved. What it usually does carry is a creation timestamp, a colour profile describing the display, the pixel dimensions of that display, and often the name and version of the operating system or capture tool.
- Do iPhone screenshots contain location data?
- No. An iPhone screenshot is a capture of the display, not a photograph, so the camera and GPS fields are not written. It sits in your photo library next to photos that do have coordinates, which is where the confusion comes from.
- Can a screenshot identify my computer?
- Not the way a camera serial number identifies a camera. The closest thing is the combination of exact pixel dimensions and colour profile, which narrows down the display model. That is weak on its own and meaningful mainly when combined with other information.
- What is actually risky about sharing a screenshot?
- Almost always the pixels rather than the metadata. Screenshots capture whatever was on screen: notification banners, browser tabs, filenames, account names in a title bar, the sliver of another window at the edge. Stripping metadata does nothing about any of that, and cropping is the more useful habit.
When the browser is the wrong tool
If you post screenshots regularly, doing this from Finder without opening an app is the version that actually gets used.
Nothing Personal for Mac does two things this page cannot. It reads the download history macOS attaches to a file — where you saved it from — which lives outside the image and is invisible to any browser. And it handles folders rather than a handful of files, from Finder, without opening anything.