Do Mercari, eBay and Etsy Strip EXIF and GPS From Your Photos?

Published 8 October 2026 · by Tekiba

Why it matters

A phone photo can carry the latitude and longitude where it was taken, in the GPS part of its EXIF block. For a sofa photographed in the front room, that is a record of a home address, attached to a file that you are about to hand to strangers. The same block holds the camera model and the time, and some cameras write a serial number or an owner's name. Whether a buyer can read any of that depends on what the marketplace does with the file between your upload and their screen — which is exactly what the companies do not describe.

What eBay says

eBay's User Privacy Notice, in the section on data it collects automatically, lists:

Certain metadata recording the settings of your camera included in images of items you upload for sale.

So eBay reads metadata from your images. The sentence speaks of camera settings, not location, and nothing on that page or in the help pages we read says whether the copy shown on a listing still carries any of it. eBay's picture policy sets rules for what a photo may show — no watermarks, no added borders — and is silent on what the file carries.

What Etsy says

Etsy's marketplace privacy policy sets out what Etsy collects in a table. In the copy of the policy Etsy publishes as a PDF, the row for its messaging feature lists:

Messages Metadata: Metadata about content (such as the location where a photo was taken)

So Etsy can record where a photo you send in Etsy Messages was taken. The policy does not say the same of listing photos, nor whether the copy a buyer sees still carries a location, and Etsy's image help pages — which we cover in can you watermark eBay or Etsy listing photos? — are about size and watermarks. A warning about "embedded location data (EXIF GPS)" circulates online attributed to Etsy; it is not in the marketplace policy we read, and we could not open the page it is said to come from, so we do not quote it.

What Mercari says

Mercari's Japanese privacy policy lists, among what it collects, the posts, photos and other content you put on the service — "お客様が本サービスに掲載・発信した投稿、写真、動画" — and, separately, information about your device, including its location ("位置情報"). It does not say anything about the metadata inside a photo, or whether it is removed. This is Mercari Japan; Mercari's US marketplace is a separate service, and we found no statement from it either.

What "not published" means here

It does not mean the marketplaces keep your GPS. Re-encoding an image tends to drop its metadata, and a site that resizes every upload may well serve a clean copy. It means that no company has told you so, which leaves you relying on behaviour that can change with an app update, can differ between the app, the website and the message system, and was never promised. Write-ups that tested uploads exist, and they disagree; we did not repeat the tests, because each needs a seller account.

Clear the photo before it goes up

The step that does not depend on anyone else is uploading a file with nothing in it.

In SignetDrop it is not a setting. Every photo is decoded and drawn onto a canvas, and a new file is written from the pixels, so the EXIF block — location included — does not come across unless you switch on the paid option to carry it, and even then "Strip GPS location" starts ticked. The marketplace presets also turn GPS off: Mercari, eBay and Etsy each set the size and shape that site's own page describes as well, as set out in image sizes for Mercari, Yahoo Auctions, eBay and Etsy.

Then check one output file. The EXIF check (Beta) reads a photo in your browser and says what it finds: a location, camera fields, a small copy of the original, XMP or IPTC. Where part of a file cannot be read, it says the location is not known rather than guessing. Nothing is uploaded.

And stop new photos being tagged. Turning off location for the camera in your phone's settings means the next batch starts clean — though it does nothing for photos already taken.

What this page does not do

It reports what three companies publish, read on one day, and it does not test their upload paths. A policy can be revised and a pipeline changed without notice. Clearing the file yourself is the only part of this you control.

Where the free version stops

The free version does ten photos at a time, up to 2048px on the longest edge, with no account, and it does not write our name onto your photos: the only mark that comes out is yours. The paid version is $29 once, not a subscription, and lifts the limits we impose. The full split is on the pricing panel.

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