Selling online? What your photos can give away
Photos taken at home can carry your address. What to check before you post a listing or send pictures to a buyer.
When you sell something second-hand, you usually photograph it at home. If your phone saves locations, every photo carries the coordinates of where it was taken, and for these photos that is your address.
What a listing photo can carry
- Location: GPS coordinates, usually accurate to a few metres.
- Time: the date and time it was taken, often with the time zone.
- Your phone or camera: the make and model; cameras often add their serial number.
- Edits: the apps that edited it and, on newer phones, Content Credentials, a signed record of how the photo was made.
Doesn’t the marketplace remove it?
Many sites remove this data when you upload a photo, but not all do, and you can’t easily check what a visitor downloads. Photos you send a buyer directly are the bigger risk: by email, through a cloud link or as a file in a messaging app, the file usually arrives exactly as it left your phone.
Before you post
- Check one photo. The PhotoCleanr report is free and shows whether it has a location and what else it carries.
- Clean the photos you post or send. PhotoCleanr takes up to 10 at a time and doesn’t re-encode the picture, so the item looks as sharp as before.
- Look at the picture too. A view from the window, a house number, a letter on the table or a reflection can say more than the metadata, and no tool removes those for you.
- If you don’t need location on your photos, turn it off for the camera: how to remove the location from a photo.
Checking is free. Each clean copy uses one credit, and credits come in packs you buy once, with no subscription.