Does Resizing a Photo Remove EXIF Data?

Most articles answering this question give a flat "no, resizing doesn't remove EXIF data," and for a lot of desktop software that's true. But it isn't a universal fact about resizing as an operation. It depends entirely on the mechanism the tool uses to process the image. A tool that reads the file, explicitly copies the EXIF block, and writes it back into the resized output will preserve your GPS coordinates, camera model, and timestamp. A tool that decodes your image into an HTML5 canvas and re-encodes it from there cannot preserve that data, because the canvas has nowhere to put it. PixelTools' Resize, Compress, and Convert tools all work the canvas way, so on this site the answer is yes, that metadata is gone. On another tool, it might not be.

We can show our own work here because we read our own code. PixelTools' Resize tool draws your source image onto an HTML5 canvas with drawImage(), then exports the result with canvas.toBlob(). The Canvas API only ever holds raw pixel data, an ImageData grid of RGBA values for every pixel. It has no concept of EXIF, IPTC, or XMP metadata blocks at all, and no field to store one in. So when the resized image is re-encoded from that canvas, whatever metadata was in the original file, camera model, GPS coordinates, timestamp, copyright info, has nothing to carry it across. This isn't a filter selectively removing GPS tags and leaving the rest. It's structurally impossible for any of that metadata to survive a canvas round-trip, because the canvas never held it in the first place.

It's worth being precise here, because overclaiming would just replace one wrong blanket answer with another. Plenty of resizing tools, especially desktop apps and photo libraries, explicitly copy the EXIF block across during a resize, on purpose, often specifically to preserve photographer and copyright information. Those tools will still carry your GPS coordinates through a resize untouched. The canvas-stripping behavior described here is specific to how browser-based tools like PixelTools' actually work under the hood, not a universal property of the word "resize." If you're relying on resizing to remove location data before sharing a photo, the safe move is to check what your specific tool does, or use one you've confirmed works through a canvas, rather than assuming resizing always strips metadata.

This happens as a byproduct of how PixelTools' image tools are built, not because we designed a dedicated "strip metadata" feature. As of this writing, PixelTools doesn't have a standalone EXIF-removal tool; the effect is a consequence of the canvas pipeline used across Resize, Compress, and the JPG/PNG/WebP converters under Convert. We've documented the same behavior on our format-conversion pages: camera model, GPS coordinates, and shooting settings embedded as EXIF data in a JPG are not carried over when the image is decoded to a canvas and re-encoded. If you're specifically trying to strip metadata, resizing or converting a photo through a canvas-based tool will get you there, but treat it as a useful side effect you can rely on for this reason, not a labeled privacy control with its own settings or guarantees.

The same mechanism strips the EXIF orientation tag, the flag some cameras and phones use to tell a viewer "this image's pixels are stored sideways, rotate it 90 degrees on display." A canvas-based tool has no field to preserve that tag either, so it has to handle rotation differently: instead of setting a tag for the next viewer to respect, it physically rotates the pixel data itself before re-encoding. That's actually why canvas-based tools tend to display images correctly and consistently regardless of which app or device took the photo, while orientation-tag-only handling is part of why some photos display sideways in certain apps. We cover that specific issue in more depth in our rotate-image article if you've run into it.

If you need to be sure before sharing a photo publicly, don't guess based on which operation you used, check the actual file. Most operating systems let you view basic file details (right-click Properties on Windows, or Get Info on Mac) which sometimes shows GPS data if present, though not always completely. A dedicated EXIF viewer, several exist as free web tools and browser extensions, will show you the full metadata block, including GPS coordinates if any remain, letting you confirm directly rather than relying on assumptions about what a given tool does. This is the only reliable way to know, since as this article covers, the same operation name can behave differently depending on the tool.