Do Screenshots Have Metadata? What They Contain

Last updated · 5 min read

Quick answer

Yes, but much less than a camera photo. A screenshot usually has no GPS location and no camera or lens data. It can still have a date and time, a colour profile and sometimes the name of the software or the user. What the picture shows, such as names, notifications and the clock, often reveals more than the file does.

Why a screenshot has less metadata than a photo

A camera photo gets its metadata from a camera, a clock and a GPS receiver. A screenshot is a copy of the screen. There is no lens, no exposure and no location fix behind it. So the camera model, the lens, the shutter speed and the GPS coordinates have nothing to describe.

What is left is small: the size of the image, a colour profile, a date and time, and sometimes a software tag. The exact fields depend on the device, the app and the file format.

What each platform saves

We found no official list of the fields in a screenshot for any platform. The facts below come from vendor pages for the file format and from third-party tests. Treat the tests as examples, because vendors change this between updates.

iPhone

Apple says that an iPhone screenshot is a PNG file in the SDR setting and a HEIF file in the HDR setting (Apple iPhone User Guide, "Change the screen capture settings on iPhone"). In an ExifTool dump of an iPhone screenshot that a user posted on GitHub in January 2026, the file had the date and time of the capture, a user comment with the word "Screenshot", a Display P3 colour profile and the pixel density. The dump had no GPS data and no camera make or model. It is one sample, so check your own files.

Android

Android has no single rule, because each maker builds its own screenshot tool. Samsung offers a Screenshot format setting for JPG or PNG in Settings > Advanced features > Screenshots and screen recorder (Samsung support page, last updated 2021-05-03). A third-party article from August 2026 (ToolFiddle) reports that Pixel screenshots are PNG files whose file names hold the date, the time and the app name, and that a JPG screenshot from a Samsung phone can carry an EXIF block with a software or model tag. We could not confirm this from a vendor page.

Windows

The SANS Internet Storm Center reported in 2012 that Snipping Tool screenshots saved as JPG contained EXIF and XMP data, including the full name of the Windows user account and a time stamp. The article is old, so a current version of the tool may behave differently. Open your own file and look.

Mac

We found no official Apple list of the fields in a Mac screenshot. The same ToolFiddle article reports a PNG file with a colour profile and a creation date. macOS also marks a screenshot with Spotlight attributes outside the image data. These attributes stay on your Mac. They do not travel inside the file when you upload or send it.

The file name and the file dates

Most systems put the date and the time in the default file name of a screenshot. The file system also stores its own dates, and these change when you copy, sync or download the file. If a file name shows a time, a project or an app that you do not want to share, rename the file before you send it.

What a screenshot reveals in the picture

The picture often leaks more than the metadata. Look for these before you send a screenshot:

  • Notification banners with message previews
  • The clock, the carrier name and the Wi-Fi icon in the status bar
  • Browser tab titles and the address bar
  • Account names, email addresses, order numbers and booking codes
  • A map, an address or a recognizable place in the background

Crop the screenshot to what you want to show. Cover the rest with a solid box, not with a blur. A metadata remover does not change any of this, because it is part of the pixels.

How to check and clean a screenshot

  1. Open the screenshot in the WipePic EXIF viewer or in WipePic. It lists the metadata that it finds, grouped by kind. Click a file to see each field and its value.
  2. Select Remove Metadata in WipePic to clean the file. WipePic works in your browser and does not upload your photos. It does not re-encode the file, so the pixels do not change.
  3. Download the clean file. Open it again to check that no metadata is left.

For other devices, see the guides for iPhone, Android, Windows and Mac.

Sources

Checked on 2026-11-08.

Questions

Does a screenshot contain my location?

Not in the metadata. A screenshot is a copy of your screen, and no camera or GPS fix is involved. Your location can still show in the picture itself, for example on a map, in a weather widget or in an address on screen.

Does a screenshot show the phone model?

Usually not as a metadata field. The size of the image, the status bar and the system fonts can still point to a device family. Some phones that save screenshots as JPEG may write a software or model tag, so check your own file.

Is a screenshot a safe way to remove the metadata of a photo?

It drops the old metadata, because the screenshot is a new image. It also gives you a lower-quality copy at the size of your screen, and the screenshot gets its own small set of metadata. Cleaning the file with WipePic keeps the pixels as they are.

Does WipePic work on screenshots?

Yes. WipePic cleans PNG, JPEG, WebP, HEIC and the other supported formats, so it also removes the PNG text, XMP and EXIF data from a screenshot. It does not remove what you can see in the picture, such as names or notifications.

Remove the metadata from your photos

Free. In your browser. Your photos do not go to a server.

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