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Photos in Word and PowerPoint files: the Exif location, device and date a picture can keep

Last updated: 28 October 2026

This page is for people who put photos into documents and slides and send them on: a site visit report with photos from a phone, a deck with pictures from an event, a listing or a portfolio with photos taken at home. It is about the details stored inside each picture, not what the photo shows. Our page on thumbnails describes what a photo file can carry in its own data; whether that data is still in the copy Office stores is what the Microsoft pages we read do not say, which is why this page tells you to check. Two related kinds of leftover data are covered elsewhere: the thumbnail a JPEG can carry inside it, in thumbnails and preview images, and the part of a picture you cropped away, in an Office file larger than its content. The same applies to pictures in an Excel workbook, which are kept in xl/media.

What a photo can carry besides the picture

Apple's iPhone User Guide does not use the word Exif, but it shows what details a photo can have. Its page See photo and video information on iPhone lists, among the details the Photos app shows for a photo, "What device captured the photo or video", "The date and time the photo or video was taken", "Camera metadata such as lens, shutter speed, file size, and more" and "Where the photo or video was taken". Some of the details on that list, such as albums and who shared a photo, belong to the photo library rather than the file. The page Share photos and videos on iPhone is the one that speaks of details travelling with a photo: "Sharing a photo or video includes sharing its associated metadata, such as date and time, location, device, and captions."

A location saved with a photo taken at home, at a client's site or at a school can say more than the document does. A date and time can contradict a document's story, and a device or camera model says what took the photos. None of this is visible on the page or slide: Word and PowerPoint show the picture, not its details.

Where the picture goes in a .docx or .pptx

An Office file is a ZIP package of parts. The text of a page or slide is in an XML part; each picture is a separate part, a JPEG, PNG or other image file, which the XML points to. Exif and the other details are inside that image file, so they travel with the document unless the image file itself is rewritten without them. A picture in a header, a slide master or a layout is stored too, even if it is not on the slide you are looking at (see templates and slide masters).

What Microsoft's pages say, and do not say

Microsoft's page Reduce the file size of a picture in Microsoft Office says the compression options "reduce both the file size and picture dimensions", and that "Any info on the changes you've made to your picture are stored in your file" until you select Discard editing data. Its page Change the default resolution for inserting pictures in Office says that with High fidelity, "pictures are not compressed unless they exceed the size of the document canvas", and that in PowerPoint 2016 and later "the default image resolution is already set to high fidelity". Neither page, nor Turn off picture compression, says what happens to a photo's Exif, location or camera details when a picture is inserted or compressed.

Microsoft's Document Inspector page does not mention picture metadata in its lists for Word or PowerPoint. For what Document Inspector does and does not cover, see what Document Inspector misses. None of the Microsoft pages we read says that an Office setting removes a photo's location; treat a photo's details as present until you have checked the pictures themselves.

Before you insert a photo

1. Decide whether the photo's details matter: a location at home or at a client's site, a date, a device model.
2. Make a copy of the photo without the location and the other details, with the photo app or editor you use, and look at the copy's details to confirm they are gone. On an iPhone, Apple's sharing page notes that the Most Compatible option means "files may convert to JPEG or MOV"; a converted file is a new file, so check its details as well.
3. Crop and edit the photo before you insert it, if you can, so the cropped part is not in the file at all.
4. Insert the copy, not the original.

How to check the pictures in a .docx or .pptx

1. Make a copy of the file, rename it to .zip and unzip it.
2. Open word/media, ppt/media or xl/media. Each picture in the document is a file there, named something like image1.jpeg or image2.png.
3. Open each picture in a program that shows its details, and look for a location, a device or camera model, dates, an author or a description.
4. Check every picture in the folder, not only those you remember: a folder can hold pictures from headers, slide masters and layouts, and pictures from slides you have since hidden.
5. If a picture has details you do not want to send, replace it in the document with a copy without them, save, and check again.

What ScrubDrop does

ScrubDrop reads .docx, .xlsx or .pptx files in your browser; the file is not uploaded. For free, one file at a time, it counts the pictures with metadata or other parts it would remove and names some of them with what it found (for example APP1(Exif) or COM, a comment), along with the other kinds of hidden data it supports; the free version removes properties, comments and tracked changes, and keeps the pictures as they are. Removing image metadata is part of ScrubDrop Pro. In a JPEG it removes the Exif and XMP data, comments, other application segments and any data after the end of the image, keeping only the JFIF header (without its thumbnail), the Adobe colour segment and the colour profile, each rebuilt from its own fields (the profile keeps only its colour data); in a PNG it removes text and time chunks and any chunk that is not on its list of picture chunks; in a GIF, comments and other blocks it does not need; in an SVG, its metadata, title and description.

The pixels are not changed: ScrubDrop does not re-encode, resize or rotate pictures, and it does not delete cropped areas. Pictures in TIFF, BMP, EMF, WMF, HD Photo, HEIC and WebP are kept as they are and reported as not checked when the file is cleaned; pictures in other formats are kept as they are too (see the limits). If a picture is damaged or uses a part ScrubDrop does not know, it is listed with the reason, and removal stops with a message rather than guess: untick image metadata to clean the rest of the file, and replace that picture yourself. The cleaned file is read again with separate parsers, and offered only if no image metadata remains in the pictures it cleans.

Questions

Sources: the Apple and Microsoft pages linked on this page were checked on 28 October 2026. ScrubDrop is not affiliated with Apple or Microsoft.