Five photos.
Don't make a map
of your week.

Most major dating apps strip EXIF from the publicly visible profile photo on upload. The original you uploaded still lands on their servers in full — they keep it for moderation, fraud-detection, and ML training. And the file's other lives (your iCloud library, a screenshot a friend took, a reverse-image-search match on Reddit) are entirely outside their strip pipeline.

Not from the version the app displays to other users in most cases — that copy has had its GPS stripped. But the same photo on your camera roll, in a shared album, on a backup drive, or in a screenshot still has it. If the app's image is ever re-derived from one of those originals (a profile importer, a third-party tool, a leaked dataset) the GPS reappears. Visual clues in the photo background can also expose location independently — a recognisable storefront, a license plate, a transit line.

Tinder displays an approximate distance to each match by design — that's the product. But it's a separate channel from photo metadata: even if every photo is clean, the app's location features ("5 miles away") give a coarse triangle that a determined person can narrow further over time. Stripping photo metadata removes one of several leakage vectors; reviewing the app's location settings handles the others.

EXIF carries an embedded thumbnail — typically a 160 × 120 JPEG used for fast previews. When you crop in Photos.app, the thumbnail is NOT always regenerated. The version stored inside the file's metadata can still show the un-cropped scene, including the face you cropped out. Tracemute removes the embedded thumbnail along with the rest of the metadata.

Send a stripped copy. Tracemute leaves the image pixel-identical — they get the same photo, the same resolution, the same colour — just without the GPS, the iPhone serial, the owner field, and the embedded thumbnail. They won't notice. You'll know.

Yes. Live Photos are HEIC + MOV pairs that share a cross-asset Apple identifier — Tracemute strips both halves and the identifier that ties them to your iCloud library. Video clips (the kind some apps let you attach as a short intro) carry the same per-frame GPS as any iPhone video. We strip those too, losslessly.