TL;DR: Behance has no published policy claiming it strips EXIF, GPS, or camera metadata from uploaded images, and its own Help Center documentation — the "Guide: Formatting Images For Display On Behance" — only discusses resizing (2800px max width, displayed at 1400px in Project View), file size limits (10MB recommended, 50MB max), a 32-megapixel pixel-count cap, and converting CMYK images to RGB for screen display. None of that is metadata removal, and Behance has never stated that it is. That puts Behance in the same undocumented category as Tumblr and Flickr rather than the same category as Instagram or Facebook, which explicitly describe stripping location data on ingest. The added wrinkle is that Behance is a professional portfolio platform owned by Adobe, and many of its users deliberately embed IPTC copyright and creator metadata to prove authorship — so the goal here usually isn't "remove everything," it's "remove GPS and device identifiers while keeping copyright intact." The dependable way to do that split is cleaning the file yourself before upload, since Behance's pipeline was never built to make that decision for you.
Does Behance remove photo metadata?
There's no evidence that it does, and Behance's own documentation gives you a strong hint why: it was never designed as a metadata-stripping pipeline in the first place. The Behance Help Center's formatting guide is the most detailed public description of what happens to an image the moment you upload it, and it's entirely about display, not privacy. It tells you Behance will show your image at 1400px wide in Project View and up to 2800px in Lightbox View, that anything under 1400px gets padded rather than upscaled, that CMYK images get converted to RGB because "computer and mobile screens are RGB," and that the platform caps uploads at 32 million pixels and 50MB. Nowhere in that document — or anywhere else in Behance's public help content — does the word "EXIF," "GPS," or "metadata" appear in the context of what gets removed.
That silence matters because it's different from how platforms that do strip metadata talk about it. Instagram and Facebook's engineering teams and privacy documentation describe their JPEG re-encoding pipelines in terms that acknowledge metadata gets discarded as a byproduct. Behance's documentation, by contrast, reads like it was written by a design team focused entirely on how projects look in the grid — because for Behance's core use case, that's exactly what matters. A platform built for creative professionals to showcase finished work has different priorities than one built for casual photo sharing, and metadata stripping has apparently never made it onto Behance's public roadmap in either direction.
What Behance's image pipeline actually does
Every image you upload to a Behance project goes through a real processing step, just not a privacy-motivated one. Behance's own guidance recommends uploading JPEGs at 2800px wide and quality 85–90 for photography projects, explicitly framing this as an input recommendation rather than a description of what Behance does to your file afterward — the platform re-serves images through its own CDN and generates the display sizes (1400px, 2800px) from whatever you upload. If your source file is in CMYK — common for print-oriented design work exported from InDesign or Photoshop — Behance converts it to RGB so it renders correctly on screens, and that conversion happens whether you want it to or not.
None of this is EXIF removal. Resizing changes pixel dimensions. CMYK-to-RGB conversion changes color values. Both operations can be implemented by an image library in ways that happen to drop metadata as a side effect, or in ways that preserve it faithfully — Behance's documentation simply doesn't say which, and unlike Reddit's image pipeline, which re-encodes aggressively enough that most EXIF drops out as a byproduct, there's no independent testing publicly available that confirms Behance's pipeline behaves the same way. If you want the underlying technical picture of what these fields actually are, our explainer on what EXIF data is breaks down the specific containers — APP1, the GPS IFD, XMP — that a resize-and-convert pipeline may or may not touch.
Behance is Adobe's platform — and Adobe cuts both ways on metadata
This is where Behance gets genuinely interesting compared to the rest of our platform series. Adobe doesn't just own Behance; Adobe is also the company that co-founded the Content Authenticity Initiative and helped build the C2PA specification — the standard behind Content Credentials, which adds a cryptographically signed provenance manifest to files edited in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Firefly. That manifest can record edit history, the tools used, and in some configurations, capture details about the creator. It's the opposite instinct from stripping: Adobe's flagship privacy initiative is about attaching more verifiable metadata to files, not less.
Photo by Kawê Rodrigues on Pexels.
That creates a real tension for anyone uploading to Behance from the Adobe ecosystem. A file exported from Photoshop with Content Credentials enabled can carry a C2PA manifest, standard EXIF camera data, GPS coordinates if your camera embedded them, and IPTC copyright fields — all at once, in the same file, serving different purposes. Behance's undocumented pipeline doesn't distinguish between them. It has no stated policy for stripping GPS while preserving a C2PA manifest, or for stripping camera metadata while leaving IPTC copyright intact. Whatever combination of fields was in the file you exported from Photoshop is very likely the same combination that ends up live on your Behance project, because nothing in Behance's public documentation claims otherwise. For more on what Content Credentials actually contain and how to handle them, see our post on what C2PA content credentials are and how to remove them.
Why Behance users often want to keep some metadata
Every other post in this series has treated metadata removal as a clean win — strip GPS, strip device identifiers, ship a cleaner file. Behance complicates that advice, because it's a portfolio platform built around attribution. A significant share of working photographers and designers deliberately embed their name and a copyright notice into a file's IPTC fields before ever exporting it, precisely so that a downloaded copy of their work still identifies who made it — a practice we cover in depth in how photographers protect their copyright with metadata. Wiping every metadata field indiscriminately before uploading to Behance can strip that attribution along with the GPS coordinates you actually wanted gone, which is a real cost for a platform whose entire business model is professionals getting discovered and credited for their work.
That's a genuinely different risk profile than the one we cover for stock photo marketplaces, where Shutterstock and Getty strip metadata as part of licensing and buyers don't need to see your copyright notice embedded in the file itself — the marketplace's own licensing terms carry the attribution instead. On Behance, the file itself is often the only thing traveling with your name on it once someone right-clicks and saves your work, so the smart move isn't a blanket strip. It's separating GPS and device identifiers, which carry privacy risk and no professional benefit, from copyright and creator fields, which carry no privacy risk and real professional benefit.
What about client and location-sensitive work?
Not every Behance upload is a personal portfolio piece with your name proudly attached. Real estate photographers, architectural photographers, and location-based designers regularly showcase client work on Behance — and that's exactly the case where GPS metadata becomes a liability rather than an asset. A project photographed at a client's home, an unreleased retail location, or a private venue can leak the exact coordinates of that site through EXIF data that Behance's pipeline was never shown to remove. We cover the same underlying risk from the shooting side in our post on how real estate photographers should handle metadata before delivery — the same caution applies once that work moves from a client hand-off to a public portfolio upload.
What stripping still doesn't solve
Cleaning your files before upload closes the machine-readable gap, but it has real limits worth stating plainly. First, it only protects the copy you actually clean — if the original file with GPS intact still sits in your camera roll, a cloud backup, or an earlier export you sent a client, none of that is affected by cleaning the version you post to Behance. Second, metadata removal says nothing about what's visible in the image itself. A property's street number on a mailbox, a distinctive architectural feature, or a reflection in a window can identify a location just as precisely as coordinates would have, and no EXIF cleaner touches pixels. For the mechanics of exactly where GPS data comes from in the first place, see how GPS coordinates get embedded in photos.
The practical move for Behance uploads
Given that Behance's documentation never claims to strip anything and there's no independent test data confirming its resize pipeline reliably removes GPS or device metadata, the safest assumption is that whatever was in your exported file is what ends up public. Metadata Cleaner handles the split that matters for creative professionals: it runs entirely in your browser, rewrites a photo, video, or audio file to remove the EXIF block, GPS IFD, and embedded thumbnail, and never uploads your file anywhere in the process. If you want copyright and creator fields to survive, add them back through Photoshop, Lightroom, or Bridge's File Info panel after cleaning, before you export the final version for Behance. That two-step habit — strip what exposes you, restore what credits you — is the closest thing to a correct default for a platform where your work and your privacy pull in different directions. As the EFF's ongoing privacy work makes clear, the burden of that decision sits with you, not with the platform, until Behance's documentation says otherwise.
Try Metadata Cleaner free and control exactly which fields travel with your next Behance upload.