Do WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Telegram remove photo metadata?

A photo taken on a phone carries the date, the device model and, if the camera has permission, the latitude and longitude of where you were standing. The question is what happens to that data when the photo goes through WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram or TikTok.

In the published tests, the first three strip almost everything when you send a photo the normal way, and a photo sent as a document or file arrives intact. None of these companies publishes a list of what it removes, so what we have are independent tests, each with its own date and device.

What do the apps officially say about metadata?

Almost nothing. We could not find a page in the WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram or TikTok help centers that says which EXIF fields are removed. What the official pages describe is compression:

• WhatsApp says documents are sent without compression, up to 2 GB per file;
• Telegram has an option to send without compression and says in its FAQ that it accepts files of any type;
• Instagram and TikTok talk about upload quality and say nothing about metadata.

The privacy policies cover something else: what the company itself collects from the file.

Does WhatsApp remove photo metadata?

When you send a photo the normal way, yes, according to the published tests. A 2025 forensic study (Soni, Perspectives in Legal and Forensic Sciences) sent 10 photos from each device, Android and iPhone, and checked the results with ExifTool and forensic software. In image mode, WhatsApp removed all EXIF data: only the resolution was left, and compression had already changed it.

In document mode, the result was the opposite. Date, location, device model, software and thumbnail arrived intact, and the file hash matched the original. Amnesty International's Citizen Evidence Lab reached the same conclusion in 2020 and recommends sending as a document precisely for people who need to preserve proof of where and when a photo was taken.

As for HD mode, WhatsApp describes the option as a quality setting and says nothing about metadata. A small 2023 test on an iPhone 13 Pro found the HD photo without location and without camera data. That is a single test, and it does not replace checking on your own device.

Does Telegram remove metadata?

It depends on how you send. In the same 2025 study, the photo sent in normal (compressed) mode lost its EXIF data, and its resolution changed. Sent as a file, it arrived with every field, GPS included, and with the same hash.

There is a caveat on Android. Since Android 10, an app can only read the location stored in a photo if it has the media location permission. In a 2022 report on Telegram's bug tracker, a photo sent as a file on Android arrived without its coordinates, and another user put this down to that missing permission. The same send-as-file action can therefore carry the GPS on one device and not on another.

Does Instagram remove photo metadata?

From the published photo, yes. In 2019, IPTC, the consortium that maintains image metadata standards, tested social networks and found no embedded metadata in the photos Instagram displayed. In the 2025 study, the published photo also kept only its resolution, with no GPS field at all.

Meta's Privacy Policy, which covers Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, says the company collects information about the content itself, such as the location where a photo was taken or the date a file was created. Meta also announced in 2024 that it reads metadata embedded in images, such as C2PA and IPTC markers, to label AI-made content. People who see the post will not find the GPS in the file, and Meta says it collects that data.

Does TikTok remove video metadata?

Good independent tests are missing here. We did not find an academic study or an official page about what TikTok strips from videos.

What does exist is the privacy policy. In it, TikTok says it collects user content and the associated metadata, such as when, where, and by whom the content was created, and that this collection can happen at the time of creation, import or upload. In 2024, TikTok announced that it reads Content Credentials (C2PA) to automatically label AI-generated content and that it would start attaching its own credentials to videos, which would stay in the downloaded file. So a video that comes out of TikTok may carry metadata your original file did not have.

If you post often, the TikTok metadata guide shows how to clean a video before uploading it, and the article on C2PA and Content Credentials explains what that record stores.

Comparison: what each app does to your photo

The table covers photos. The video tests we found come from software vendors and use a single device, so we left them out.

If the app strips the GPS, why clean the photo first?

There are four practical reasons:

1. The removal applies to whoever receives the photo or sees the post. By their own policies, Meta and TikTok read the location and date when they receive the file.
2. Sending as a document or file, which many people do to avoid losing quality, carries everything: GPS, date, device model.
3. None of this is guaranteed. The apps do not publish what they remove and change their behavior between versions, as the difference in Telegram between Android and iPhone shows.
4. The same file often travels by other routes, such as email, Google Drive and client deliveries, which leave the contents untouched.

To remove the location before sending from Android, see how to remove location from photos and videos on Android. On iPhone, see how to remove location in the Photos app.

How to test your app in five minutes

Because each app version and each device can behave differently, the most reliable test is your own:

1. Take a photo with the camera's location setting turned on.
2. Open the original photo in the free EXIF viewer and check that latitude, longitude and the device model show up.
3. Send the photo to yourself or to someone you trust, once the normal way and once as a document or file.
4. Download both received copies and open each one in the viewer.
5. Write down what disappeared, with the date and the app version.

The viewer reads the file in your browser and sends nothing to a server. For videos, use the video metadata checker. If you want to understand each field that appears, the photo EXIF and GPS guide explains them one by one.