Does Signal Remove Photo Metadata?

What Signal says

Signal does not have a help page on this. The clearest statements are in its public issue trackers on GitHub:

• 2018, Android (issue 7862). A user noticed that Signal removed EXIF data from photos. A Signal developer replied: "It was intentional."
• 2019, Android (issue 9211). A user complained that photos got smaller. A Signal developer answered: "We also explicitly strip revealing metadata from photos. Most people are unaware that many photos contain GPS data, and so we choose to strip it rather than preserve it." The developer added that Signal only changes the copy that it sends. The original photo on your phone stays the same.

The same issue says Signal also compresses photos. A user in that issue saw a 1.5 MB photo come back at about 300 KB.

What the reports and tests found

The last row does not fit the others. Soni's study was published in June 2025 in Perspectives in Legal and Forensic Sciences, and it also tested WhatsApp and Telegram. We could not find out why it differs from the GitHub reports. The reports came from users of different app versions, so we cannot say which one is right for your phone. Treat "send as file" on Signal as unproven and test it.

What stays when you send a photo on Signal

• The picture itself. A street sign, a house number or a view from a window can still show where you were.
• The file name. A GitHub issue (7357) is titled "Signal Desktop leaks image filenames". We did not test this. Check the name of a file before you send it.
• Other copies of the photo. Signal only changes the copy that it sends. The same photo sent by email or posted on a website still has all its metadata.
• Other kinds of files. See the last question below.

Signal encrypts your messages end to end. That protects the photo on its way. It does not change what is inside a file that you send as it is.

How to check what Signal sends

1. Open a test photo in the WipePic EXIF viewer and note the GPS, date and camera fields.
2. Send the photo to your Note to Self chat or to a friend. Try the way you really send: as a photo, and as a file.
3. Save the received image from the chat.
4. Open the saved image in the EXIF viewer.

The viewer runs in your browser. Your photos are not uploaded. If the saved image shows no GPS or camera data, Signal removed it for that app version. Repeat the test after app updates.

When you should still clean a photo first

You may think Signal handles it. Clean the photo first when:

• you also send or post the same photo somewhere else;
• you want to send a photo as a file and are not sure what Signal does;
• you want to keep the full resolution and not rely on the chat copy.

Open WipePic, add your photos and select Remove Metadata. WipePic does not re-encode the photo, so the pixels stay the same. It keeps the orientation and the color profile, and it removes the GPS location, camera details, dates and author fields. It cleans JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF, TIFF and DNG. For the steps in detail, see how to remove the location from a photo.

Sources

Signal-Android issues 7862 (2018), 7865 (2018) and 9211 (2019). Signal-iOS issue 5919 (2024). Signal-Desktop issue 7357. Soni, "Forensic Value of Exif Data", Perspectives in Legal and Forensic Sciences, 2025 (journal.hep.com.cn). Checked on 2026-11-08. GitHub replies are statements by developers at the time, not a current help page, and Signal can change its behavior.