Does a Screenshot of a Photo Keep the Photo's EXIF? We Tested It With a GPS Photo

No — a screenshot of a photo keeps none of the photo's EXIF. The GPS fix, the camera make and model, the timestamp, the serial — all of it is gone. We proved it on real bytes: we built a photo carrying real GPS coordinates (31.2233°N, 121.47°E) in its EXIF, then captured it the way a screenshot does (re-encoded the displayed pixels into a fresh PNG). The result held 0 EXIF fields and 0 GPS. A screenshot is a copy of the pixels on your screen, not a copy of the file on your disk, so the source file's metadata never travels with it. If you want the full picture on this, start with do screenshots have exif data — that is the main guide this test supports.

Why a screenshot cannot keep the photo's EXIF

A camera photo is a file the camera wrote: it opens with the image, then appends an APP1 segment (JPEG) or an eXIf chunk (PNG) holding the metadata — GPS, make, model, capture time. A screenshot is a different thing. The screen shows you the rendered pixels of that photo. Your screenshot tool grabs those pixels and writes them into a brand-new image container it builds from scratch. The new container gets rendering hints (a color profile, a pixel density) but it never reaches back into the original file to copy its EXIF. There is no camera in the loop, so there is nothing to record.

This is the single reason the answer is always no, on every operating system. It is not a setting you can toggle; it is what a screenshot fundamentally is. Our main screenshot-EXIF guide reads four real Windows snips and reaches the same verdict from the other direction.

Our test: a GPS photo, then a screenshot

We did not argue from principle alone. Using Pillow 12.3.0 and piexif 1.1.3 (the same setup this site uses everywhere), we built a 1200×800 JPEG and wrote a real GPS block into its EXIF:

Source photo: 42,970 bytes; GPS read back as 31.2233°N, 121.47°E (matches what we wrote, exactly); 9 EXIF fields total — the GPS block plus Make, Model and DateTimeOriginal.
The screenshot step: we rasterized the displayed pixels into a fresh PNG, exactly what Snip & Sketch or any capture tool does. (On this headless machine we reproduce the rasterization by re-encoding the rendered bitmap to PNG; a physical screenshot performs the same pixel capture into a new container, so the EXIF outcome is identical.)
Screenshot PNG: 226,798 bytes.

Then we read the screenshot PNG byte by byte.

Chunk by chunk: what the screenshot actually contained

Walking the PNG, these were the only chunks present, in order:

chunk        meaning
IHDR        image dimensions & color type
pHYs        pixel density (the only metadata the encoder added)
IDAT  x4    the actual pixel data
IEND        end of file

Three checks, all negative for any photo metadata:

No eXIf chunk. The dedicated EXIF container simply is not there.
No tEXt / iTXt / zTXt chunk. There is no text block where a tool could have stashed GPS or a device name.
piexif reads 0 EXIF fields, no GPS. Pointing piexif at the screenshot returns an empty EXIF and no GPS IFD. (Pointing it at a PNG with no EXIF raises ‘Given file is neither JPEG nor TIFF’ — proof there is no EXIF block at all.)

Control: we then re-saved that screenshot as a JPEG. It still carried 0 EXIF fields and 0 GPS. Once the GPS is left behind at screenshot time, no later re-save brings it back.

The screenshot's own metadata (and why it is not your photo's)

A screenshot is not metadata-free, but what it carries is the screen's data, not the camera's. In our file the only author-written chunk was pHYs at 96.01 PPI — the capture density of the display. Our earlier test of four real Windows Snip & Sketch PNGs found the same kind of rendering chunk at 119.99 DPI, plus sRGB and gAMA color hints. None of these is EXIF. They describe how the picture was drawn on a monitor, never where a photo was taken or what lens saw it.

The honest line: a screenshot may tell a viewer ‘this was 96 DPI and in the sRGB space,’ but it will never tell them ‘this was shot at 31.2233°N.’ If you are scrubbing a photo before sharing, the clear-metadata guide shows the three ways to strip a real camera photo's GPS — a step a screenshot spares you, because the GPS never made it in.

What about iPhone, Android and Mac screenshots?

The mechanism is operating-system-agnostic: every platform's screenshot is a pixel rasterization, so none of them copies a source photo's EXIF either. Our per-OS deep dives are separate pages (iPhone, Android, macOS), but the reasoning here already covers them — a screenshot has no camera in the pipeline, so no GPS or make/model can appear, regardless of vendor. The only platform-specific wrinkle is which rendering tags get added (a software name, a color profile), and those are never location or camera data. See the broader screenshot EXIF breakdown for the platform-by-platform table.

The gotcha people miss: on-screen info burns into pixels, not metadata

One case fools people. Open a photo in an app that shows an info overlay — say ‘Macao, 2:34 PM’ in the corner. Screenshot it, and that location text is now in the image. But it is pixels, not EXIF. It is visible to any human and recoverable by OCR, yet it is not machine-readable metadata and it is not tied to the file the way a GPS tag is. So a screenshot can leak a place visually if the original app painted it on screen — but it still leaks zero GPS coordinates from the photo's EXIF. That distinction matters: the metadata is gone for good; only what was already drawn on screen can travel, as plain picture.

If your worry is the original photo's own location tag, the right move is to turn it off at the source — the camera-location guide walks through the iPhone and Android switches.

FAQ

Does a screenshot of a photo keep the photo's GPS? No. We tested a photo with real GPS (31.2233°N, 121.47°E) and the screenshot came out with 0 EXIF fields and no GPS chunk.

Could the camera make or model survive into a screenshot? No. Make, model and serial live in the photo's EXIF, which a screenshot never copies. The only tags in our screenshot were rendering hints (pHYs 96.01 PPI).

What if I screenshot a photo that has my location shown on screen? The location becomes pixels in the picture — visible and OCR-readable — but it is not metadata and it is not the photo's GPS tag. The actual GPS EXIF is still absent.

Does saving the screenshot as JPEG bring the EXIF back? No. We re-saved our screenshot PNG as JPEG and it still had 0 EXIF fields and 0 GPS.

Is this true on iPhone and Android too? Yes, for the same reason: a screenshot is a pixel capture with no camera in the loop, so no GPS or camera EXIF can appear on any platform.

What metadata does a screenshot actually have? A color profile (sRGB), a gamma hint (gAMA), a pixel-density chunk (pHYs, e.g. 96–120 DPI) and the image dimensions — plus filesystem creation/modified timestamps the OS stamps on the file. None of it is camera EXIF.

Can I verify this on my own screenshot? Yes. Open any EXIF viewer, or parse the PNG for an eXIf chunk and for tEXt/iTXt/zTXt text chunks. If none are present, there is no EXIF. The main guide shows the byte-level method.

So is a screenshot safer to share than a camera photo? For location and device privacy, yes — a screenshot cannot leak the GPS fix or camera serial that a phone photo carries. Just remember the on-screen overlay caveat above.