TL;DR: No — 500px does not strip EXIF metadata from photos, and it goes further than most photo-sharing sites by building a public feature, Gear Pages, directly on top of that data. 500px's own Gear Pages FAQ confirms camera and lens information gets read from each upload's EXIF block and used to populate a crowdsourced database of what gear photographers actually shoot with — a feature that "cannot be disabled." GPS location data survives too: 500px is one of the small group of major platforms that doesn't automatically re-encode images aggressively enough to strip it. There's a real catch for sellers: 500px's own documentation states that images missing EXIF data are treated as a signal an image "should not be approved for Marketplace licensing," meaning stripping metadata can work against you if you're selling through their Marketplace. The only documented way to actually remove EXIF from a 500px upload is deleting the photo and re-uploading a version with the data already stripped before it reaches their servers — editing fields in Photo Manager corrects what's displayed, not what's stored.
Does 500px remove photo metadata?
Not by default, and — like Flickr — not as a design goal at all. 500px was built for photographers who want technical shooting details visible, not stripped, and its retention policy reflects that from the ground up. Where Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X re-encode images aggressively enough on ingest that EXIF and GPS data rarely make it through as a side effect of their compression pipelines, 500px does the opposite: it actively reads the EXIF block on every upload and builds a public-facing feature around what it finds.
That feature is called Gear Pages, and 500px's support documentation describes it as "a constantly updated database providing all 500px members with a useful look at what people can do with these cameras and lenses in the real world." Every photo you upload with a recognizable camera or lens in its EXIF data gets automatically linked into that database — an intentional design choice, not an accidental retention.
Gear Pages: a feature built entirely on your EXIF data
Gear Pages pull camera make, model, and lens information straight from the EXIF block 500px's system reads on upload, and — critically — the feature itself cannot be turned off. 500px's Gear Pages FAQ is explicit on this point: "Can I disable Gear Pages? No." If your photo's EXIF includes recognizable camera or lens data, it becomes part of that crowdsourced gear database whether you want it there or not.
If 500px's automated system mismatches the wrong camera or lens to your photo, you can go into your Photo Manager and correct it — but that correction only changes what displays, and 500px says so directly: fixing the auto-populated data "will not remove the Gear link." The underlying mechanism is reading whatever EXIF arrived with the file; editing that reading after the fact doesn't reach back into the stored original.
This is a meaningfully different retention model from platforms we've covered elsewhere in this series. Our explainer on what EXIF data actually is covers the technical structure — camera make/model, lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and GPS coordinates, all stored in a standardized block inside the file. 500px isn't just failing to strip that block; it's actively parsing it into a public feature other members browse.
Camera equipment info vs. per-photo EXIF — two separate systems
It's worth distinguishing two things 500px calls "camera and equipment information," because they're not the same system. Your account settings page has separate +Cameras and +Lenses buttons under the Profile section, letting you manually list gear you own as part of your bio — that's a self-reported equipment list, unrelated to any specific photo. Gear Pages, by contrast, are populated automatically per-photo from the EXIF block 500px reads at upload. You could have an empty gear list on your profile and still have every photo you post feeding data into individual Gear Pages, because the two features pull from entirely different sources.
Photo by Josh Sorenson on Pexels.
GPS location data: 500px doesn't strip it either
500px sits alongside Flickr as one of the few major platforms that doesn't aggressively re-encode uploads in a way that happens to remove GPS coordinates. If your camera or phone recorded a location at the moment of capture, that data travels into the EXIF block the same way camera and lens information does, and nothing in 500px's standard upload flow filters it out. Our piece on how GPS coordinates get embedded in photos in the first place covers where that data originates on the capture side — a smartphone with Location Services enabled for its camera app writes the coordinates automatically, before you've made any choice about who sees the photo.
500px doesn't publish a dedicated GPS display feature the way it does for Gear Pages, but that's a distinction without much practical difference: the coordinates are still embedded in the file itself if your device recorded them, and anyone downloading the original gets a copy carrying that data regardless of whether 500px's interface surfaces it prominently. If you're uploading a photo shot somewhere you'd rather not disclose — your home, a client's property, a scouting location — the platform's UI not showing a map pin doesn't mean the coordinates aren't sitting in the file.
The Marketplace catch: stripped EXIF can work against you
Here's where 500px diverges sharply from every other platform in this series, and it's worth understanding before you strip anything if you sell through 500px Marketplace. The same Gear Pages FAQ that explains the camera-database feature also states the reasoning behind requiring EXIF on Marketplace submissions plainly: "Copyrighted images are often stripped of their EXIF data, providing a clear indication that an image should not be approved for Marketplace licensing by our Content Team." In other words, 500px's own review process treats a missing EXIF block as a red flag for potential copyright infringement, not a privacy-conscious upload.
That creates a real tension for photographers who normally strip metadata as a matter of habit before posting anywhere. If you're uploading to 500px purely to share work publicly, stripping EXIF and GPS before upload works exactly like it does on any other platform — cleaner privacy, no downside. If you're uploading the same file to Marketplace for licensing, arriving with an empty EXIF block may cost you approval. The practical answer isn't "never strip metadata for 500px" — it's separating GPS removal, which carries no marketplace penalty since 500px's review process is looking for camera/lens EXIF as an authenticity signal rather than location data specifically, from full metadata stripping, which does. Our guide on why photographers should clean metadata before delivering files covers this same trade-off for stock and client delivery workflows more broadly — knowing which fields matter to your buyer or platform, and which are pure liability, is the actual skill here rather than stripping everything indiscriminately.
Photo by Michael Burrows on Pexels.
What 500px's Terms of Service say about your accompanying data
Beyond the EXIF block itself, it's worth knowing 500px reserves broad rights over the descriptive information attached to what you upload. The Gear Pages FAQ quotes the relevant clause of 500px's Terms of Service directly: "500px has the right to modify, alter and amend photo titles, descriptions, tags, and other accompanying information for any Visual Content and the right to submit Visual Content to other parties and authorized agents for the purpose of creating tags for Visual Content." That's separate from the EXIF question — it covers titles, descriptions, and tags you or 500px's system attach to a listing — but it's a reminder that once content is on the platform, 500px treats the metadata layer, broadly defined, as something it can adjust rather than something under your exclusive control.
How to actually remove EXIF from a photo already tied to a Gear Page
If you've already uploaded a photo and want its EXIF gone, 500px's own support documentation gives one path: delete the photo, strip the EXIF data from your local copy, and re-upload it. There's no in-platform tool that reaches into a live upload and removes metadata after the fact — Photo Manager edits are display corrections, not deletions, and as covered above, they explicitly don't remove the Gear Page link even when they change what's shown. If keeping the photo's engagement, comments, or URL matters to you, that's a real cost to weigh against just leaving the metadata in place.
How 500px compares to other photo-sharing platforms
500px and Flickr are the closest match in this series — both retain camera and GPS data by default, and both built a public-facing feature around displaying it rather than treating it as something to remove. Tumblr lands in similar territory on EXIF/GPS retention, though without an equivalent to Gear Pages. Reddit's image pipeline sits in the middle, re-encoding aggressively enough that most EXIF drops out as a byproduct of bandwidth optimization rather than an intentional privacy design. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X sit at the strict end, with re-encoding aggressive enough that GPS rarely survives upload on any of them.
What sets 500px apart even within the permissive group is the Marketplace incentive running the opposite direction from privacy: most platforms give you no reason to keep EXIF around, but 500px's own review process actively penalizes its absence on licensing submissions. That's not a design pattern that shows up anywhere else covered in this series.
What stripping still doesn't hide
Two limits are worth stating plainly, same as with every platform in this series. First, removing metadata only affects the copy you actually clean — if the original with intact GPS and EXIF still sits in your camera roll, an editing project file, or an earlier 500px upload, sharing that original anywhere later exposes exactly what you thought you'd handled. Second, metadata is only the invisible layer. A photo with no GPS tag can still show a recognizable storefront, a landmark, or a distinctive backdrop that places the shot just as precisely as coordinates would have. Stripping the EXIF block closes the machine-readable leak; it says nothing about what's visible in the frame itself.
How to remove photo metadata before uploading to 500px
Because 500px reads whatever EXIF and GPS data arrives with a photo — and builds a permanent Gear Page around what it finds — the dependable fix is cleaning the file before it reaches your profile at all. Metadata Cleaner does this entirely in your browser: drop in a photo, and it rewrites the file without its EXIF block, GPS IFD, XMP and IPTC records, and embedded thumbnail, handing you back a clean copy in about a minute. Nothing uploads to us; the processing happens locally, on your machine.
If you're posting for portfolio or personal sharing, that clean copy is the end of the story — no Gear Page gets created, and no GPS data travels with the file. If you're submitting the same shot to Marketplace, weigh the Content Team's EXIF-as-authenticity-signal review against what you're comfortable disclosing, and consider stripping GPS specifically while leaving camera EXIF intact rather than removing everything. For the full walkthrough across desktop and phone, see our guide on how to strip EXIF data from a photo. As the EFF's ongoing work on privacy makes clear, metadata is a category of exposure that platform-specific display settings rarely address — checking the file itself is the only way to know what's actually there.
500px isn't hiding what it does here; its own FAQ says outright that Gear Pages read EXIF automatically and that the feature can't be turned off, and that Marketplace submissions get reviewed partly on whether that EXIF block is present. The platform simply built its defaults, and part of its licensing review, around photographers who keep that information intact. If that's not what you want for a given photo, the fix has to happen before you hit upload. Try Metadata Cleaner free and post the clean copy.