Platform behaviour
Does YouTube remove EXIF data?
Yes, from the public copy
YouTube transcodes every upload and the delivered streams carry no camera or GPS metadata — but there is a second location field that has nothing to do with your file.
What actually happens
- Every upload is transcoded into a ladder of renditions. The original container is not what gets served, so metadata written by your camera does not survive into the streams viewers receive.
- YouTube still receives and keeps your original file. Transcoding is a delivery decision, not a deletion.
- The recording location on a video is a separate field you set in YouTube Studio. It lives in the video record rather than in the file, it is deliberately public, and removing GPS from the file does not clear it.
- Unlisted is not private. The video record travels with whatever you typed into its fields, and an unlisted URL is shareable by anyone who has it.
The part most guides skip
Cleaning the file and clearing the Studio location are two separate jobs. People do the first, assume it covered the second, and publish coordinates they typed in themselves.
This distinction matters more than the yes-or-no answer. "Strips EXIF" nearly always means "strips it from the copy other people can download". Your original file — coordinates, serial number, timestamp and all — was still transmitted, and it is still on their servers.
What to do instead
Clean the file before you upload it. It takes a second, it costs you no image quality here, and it removes the question entirely: if the metadata was never in the file you sent, no platform policy has to be trusted.
Remove metadata from your photo, check what is in there with the EXIF viewer, or read our full investigation:do social networks strip metadata?
Other platforms
- InstagramYes, from the public copy
- FacebookYes, from the public copy
- X (Twitter)Yes, from the public copy
- WhatsAppIt depends how you send it
- TelegramIt depends how you send it
- RedditYes, from the public copy
- DiscordIt depends how you send it
- LinkedInYes, from the public copy
- PinterestYes, from the public copy
- TikTokYes, from the public copy
Platform behaviour changes without announcement. These notes reflect widely reproduced testing rather than official documentation, because most platforms do not publish this. Treat them as a guide, not a guarantee — which is itself the argument for stripping locally.