Does WordPress strip EXIF and IPTC data from images?

What happens at upload

Two separate things happen to a photo's embedded information.

WordPress reads some of it into the database. At upload, core extracts a set of fields from the file's EXIF and IPTC blocks and saves them with the attachment: camera model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, capture time, credit, copyright, keywords, and a title and caption if present. An embedded title becomes the attachment's Title and an embedded caption becomes its Caption. Core also uses the EXIF orientation flag to rotate the generated images so that phone photos are the right way up.

The files are written. The original is saved as received. Then the resized copies are generated by one of two PHP image libraries, whichever the server has. WordPress prefers Imagick and falls back to GD.

With Imagick, core strips embedded profiles when resizing to cut file size but protects those five kinds, with code comments naming colour, copyright, orientation and rights data as the reasons. GD does not carry metadata across when it writes a new image, so nothing survives.

You can see which library your site uses under Tools → Site Health → Info → Media Handling.

Why it matters: what visitors actually receive

Pages rarely serve the original. They serve the large, medium or -scaled copy. So the metadata that reaches the public is whatever the copies contain:

• On an Imagick server, your credit and copyright travel with the displayed images. So does GPS location, if the camera recorded it.
• On a GD server, displayed images are clean of both.

The original, complete with every tag, remains at its own address in the uploads folder. It is not linked when a -scaled version exists, but it is publicly reachable by anyone who removes -scaled or the size suffix from the file name.

Does image metadata affect SEO?

Not rankings. Google's image documentation does not list EXIF data among the signals for understanding or ranking an image, and camera settings are of no use to it.

One kind of metadata does have a documented use. Google Images can display an image's creator, credit line and copyright notice, and it reads those from IPTC photo metadata embedded in the file, or from structured data on the page. If you are a photographer, agency or publisher, that attribution is worth having, and it only works if the IPTC fields survive in the file Google fetches.

So the practical question becomes: are those fields in the image version that appears on the page?

• Imagick: yes, provided they were in the original.
• GD: no. Supply the same information through ImageObject structured data instead (creator, creditText, copyrightNotice, license), which Google accepts as an alternative. Our ImageObject schema page lists the properties.

Privacy: location data

The other side of metadata is what you may not want published. Phone photos often embed GPS coordinates. For a business premises that is harmless. For a photo taken at home, it is a street address in a file anyone can download.

WordPress does not remove location data from originals, and on Imagick servers it is kept in resized copies too. To be safe:

• Strip location before upload. Phone sharing options and desktop export dialogs usually have a "remove location" or "strip metadata" choice. Keep the copyright fields if you want credit.
• Or process on the server. Image optimisation plugins commonly offer to strip EXIF while preserving or discarding IPTC.
• Developers who need every profile removed, the protected kinds and location included, have to add custom handling. Core's image_strip_meta filter only switches its own partial stripping on or off.

Remember that whatever you do to new uploads, files already in the library keep what they were uploaded with.

Checking your own images

1. Download a displayed image from a live post (not from the Media Library screen), such as the -1024x683 version.
2. Open its properties or info panel, or use a metadata viewer, and look for camera, location and copyright fields.
3. Repeat for the original by removing the size suffix from the URL.
4. If credit matters and the displayed copy lacks it, add ImageObject markup, or ask your host about enabling Imagick.

File size is a minor consideration here. Metadata adds a few kilobytes to tens of kilobytes per image, which is small next to the gains from sensible dimensions and quality settings.