Quick answer
Two different things are easy to mix up. The listing location is a field you choose inside Marketplace. The EXIF data is information your camera wrote into the photo file, which can include GPS coordinates. We found no Meta document that says whether the copy of your photo shown on a listing keeps or drops that EXIF data. Cleaning the photo first means you do not depend on it.
What Facebook says it does
- Facebook's Help Center page Change the location of your Facebook Marketplace listings says you can type your city, neighborhood or zip code, or select your location on a map, and that when you set up a new listing you will also have the option to choose a location for that listing. That is a setting you pick in the listing flow.
- The page Sell something on Facebook Marketplace says: "We may enhance your listing photos and videos to improve their quality." So listing photos are processed after upload. The page does not say what happens to metadata.
- Meta's Data Policy, in the version dated 4 January 2022 and hosted in Instagram's Help Center, says the information it collects can include "information in or about the content you provide (like metadata), such as the location of a photo or the date a file was created." That describes what Meta may collect. It does not say whether the public copy of your photo keeps that data. We could not read the body of Meta's current Privacy Policy page, so we quote this version.
- We found no Help Center article stating whether Marketplace removes EXIF from listing photos.
What a buyer can and cannot learn
A buyer can see your photos, so anything visible in them is public: your garage door, your street, a house number. They can also see the location you chose for the listing. Whether coordinates inside the file survive on the copy they view is something Meta does not publish. A file you send directly by any route that does not strip metadata keeps whatever it holds, so clean it first.
Clean the photos before you upload
- Open the tool above and add your JPG, PNG or WebP photos, up to 5 at a time. It runs entirely in your browser and your files are never uploaded.
- Read the before list. It shows what each file held, such as GPS position, camera make and model, serial number, and date and time.
- Download the cleaned copies. The metadata is cut out without re-encoding, so there is no quality loss. The ICC colour profile is kept, and on JPEGs a bare rotation flag is kept so photos stay upright.
- Check the after list. The tool re-reads each cleaned file to show you what is left.
- Upload the cleaned files to your listing, then set the listing location with Marketplace's own location option. HEIC files are re-saved as JPEG only if your browser can open them (Safari can); otherwise convert them first. GIF is not supported.
What this does not remove
- What is visible. Faces, street signs, house numbers and the view from a window stay in the picture. Shoot against a plain wall or crop them out.
- File names. The tool does not rename files. Rename any file that names your street or town.
- Platform-side copies. The tool cannot clean what Facebook stores or processes after upload.
- The listing location. Cleaning photos does not change the location you set on the listing.
Messaging buyers too? See what WhatsApp does with photo metadata.