TL;DR: Now, mostly — as of a rollout that finished in mid-2026. Starting in late January 2026, Microsoft Teams began automatically removing EXIF metadata from images shared in chats and channels, and worldwide deployment completed by mid-June 2026. The scrub targets the fields people worry about most: GPS coordinates, camera Make and Model, and manufacturer data. It applies to Teams for Windows, Mac and web, it is on by default, and admins cannot turn it off. But it is narrow in three ways that matter. It does not touch videos, so an MP4's moov/udta atoms ride along untouched. It does not apply when you share a photo as a OneDrive link instead of a direct upload — Microsoft offers that as the deliberate way to preserve EXIF. And it does not strip the sender's own original. Clean the file yourself and none of those gaps apply.
Does Microsoft Teams remove photo metadata?
For years the answer was no, which made Teams unusual. Consumer platforms — Facebook, Instagram, X, iMessage, WhatsApp — have stripped EXIF from shared images since the mid-2010s, but the workplace tools where people trade screenshots and site photos all day lagged behind. That changed in 2026. Microsoft announced through the Microsoft 365 roadmap that Teams would automatically remove hidden EXIF metadata from images shared in chats and channels, "to protect sensitive details such as photo location and device information from being shared without user awareness."
The timeline is worth pinning down, because "does Teams strip metadata" has a different answer depending on when you last checked. Rollout began with Targeted Release tenants in late January 2026 and reached general worldwide availability, along with GCC, GCC High and DoD environments, by mid-June 2026. So on any current tenant, the feature is live: drop a phone photo into a channel today and Teams removes the location and device tags before your colleagues can read them. The visible picture is unchanged — same resolution, same colors — because only the invisible header is touched. If the term EXIF is unfamiliar, our primer on what EXIF data actually is walks through what a camera writes into every frame.
What exactly does Teams strip, and what does it leave?
Microsoft's notice names the targets explicitly: GPS location, camera model, and manufacturer information — the EXIF fields that answer where a photo was taken and what took it. Those are the highest-stakes tags, so the scrub covers the case that matters most. A picture snapped on a phone with location services on, then dropped into a Teams conversation, no longer hands the recipient the latitude and longitude baked into its GPS IFD.
The honest framing is that the feature is described as EXIF removal, and EXIF is not the only place metadata lives. XMP and IPTC packets — the records that hold captions, copyright, keywords, and on many cameras a second copy of the coordinates — sit outside the EXIF block. PNG stores text in dedicated tEXt, zTXt and iTXt chunks, where editing and AI tools like to write software names, prompts and provenance. Microsoft's announcement does not claim to clear those containers, so the careful assumption is that a file reading as "location removed" in its EXIF GPS tags may still name a place in an XMP field. We pull that thread further in what metadata scrubbing actually removes, because "stripped" is a verb that hides a lot of detail about which fields.
Photo by Christina Morillo on Pexels.
There is also a difference between EXIF and the identity of the file. Strip the GPS coordinates and you have removed where; the camera make, model and — on many devices — a serial number can still answer which device. None of those pin a map location on their own, but together they fingerprint a specific phone and a specific moment. Microsoft names Make, Model and manufacturer among the removed fields, which is more thorough than a GPS-only pass, but it is worth confirming on your own tenant rather than assuming every tag in the block is gone.
Why do OneDrive links and your own copy keep everything?
This is where the feature stops being a blanket guarantee. Teams is not a standalone file store; it is a chat client wrapped around SharePoint and OneDrive. As Microsoft's own documentation explains, a file you share in a channel lands in that team's SharePoint document library, while a file you share in a private or group chat lands in your OneDrive for Business, in a "Microsoft Teams Chat Files" folder. The EXIF removal is applied to the image as it is shared into the conversation — it is a sharing-layer step, not a rewrite of every copy that exists in the backend.
Two consequences follow, and Microsoft is upfront about both. First, the sender's original is not stripped: the person who uploaded the photo can still open their own copy and read the full EXIF. Second — and this is the one that surprises people — Microsoft's recommended workaround for preserving EXIF is to upload the image to OneDrive and share a link to it through Teams instead of attaching it directly. Sharing by link deliberately bypasses the scrub. That means the exact action that feels equivalent to a normal upload — pasting a OneDrive share link into a chat — hands the recipient a file with its metadata intact. The scrub protects the direct-upload path; it was never meant to cover a link to a file sitting in cloud storage.
The practical takeaway is the same one that catches people on every platform: the way you share decides what survives. An inline, directly-uploaded image gets the EXIF treatment. A link to the same photo in OneDrive, or a copy pulled straight from the SharePoint library, does not. If you are relying on Teams to protect a sensitive location, "I shared the photo" is not specific enough — how you shared it is the whole question. The GPS tag in particular is stubborn across handling paths, which is why we gave it its own explainer on how GPS coordinates get embedded in photos.
Does Teams strip metadata from videos and other files?
No — and this is the largest gap. Teams' removal is explicitly an image feature. It does not run video through the EXIF pass, because video does not use EXIF the way a JPEG does. An MP4 or MOV recorded on a phone carries its metadata in container atoms — the moov/udta structures that hold the recording timestamp, the device make and model, and, if location services were on while you filmed, the GPS coordinates the camera app wrote in. Drop that clip into a Teams channel and all of it travels with the file. A video is often more revealing than a still, because it records the same place across a stretch of time rather than a single instant.
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.
The same logic extends to everything that is not a directly-uploaded image. Audio files keep their ID3 tags — artist, software, sometimes a recording location. Office documents keep their author names and revision history. Design exports keep the fingerprints of the application that produced them. Teams stores all of these as ordinary files in SharePoint and OneDrive, and a file host's default is to keep what it is handed byte-for-byte. The EXIF pass that tidies a JPEG was not built to inspect an .mp4, an .mp3, a .docx or a .png chunk, so it does not. If you want to see how much the container format alone decides, our breakdown of HEIC versus JPEG metadata shows how differently two image formats behave with the same photo inside.
What does Teams' EXIF removal still not protect?
Even on the happy path — a directly-uploaded JPEG whose GPS Teams does remove — a few limits are worth stating plainly. Removing the coordinates is not the same as removing the identity of the file; the device make, model and often a serial number can survive to answer "which camera and when" even after "where" is gone. Anonymity is not one tag, it is the whole block. And because the scrub is a sharing-layer step over cloud storage, the copy that reaches a recipient through a link, or the copy an admin or the sender pulls from the underlying library, is not the copy the conversation view scrubbed.
There is also a limit that has nothing to do with metadata. The broader point, which the EFF's work on privacy makes well, is that metadata is a category — GPS, timestamps, device serials, captions, software fingerprints — and clearing one member of that category while the rest survive is not the same as privacy. Teams' feature is a real, welcome improvement that brings an enterprise tool up to the bar consumer apps set a decade ago. It is not a promise that every file you share, in every way you can share it, has been sanitized of everything it was carrying when you made it. For a chat tool sitting on top of SharePoint, that distinction is the difference between "usually clean" and "reliably clean," and only one of those is a foundation for a privacy decision.
How do you remove photo metadata before uploading to Teams?
The dependable fix is to clean the file on your own machine, before Teams — or SharePoint, or a OneDrive link — ever receives it, so none of the path-by-path behavior above can matter. Metadata Cleaner does this in the browser: drop in a photo or a video and it rewrites the file without its EXIF block, GPS IFD, XMP and IPTC records, PNG text chunks and embedded thumbnail, then hands you back a clean copy. Because it handles video as well as images — and audio, with its ID3 tags — it closes the exact gaps Teams leaves open: the phone clip the image scrub never inspects, the metadata a OneDrive link preserves by design, the device fingerprint that can outlast the GPS tag. The processing happens locally and the file is never uploaded to us.
Once you have the stripped copy, share that instead of the original, and it stops mattering whether Teams scrubs your upload, skips it because you sent a link, or stores an untouched version in the backend — there is nothing left to expose either way. For the platform-by-platform steps across desktop and phone, our guide on how to strip EXIF data from a photo covers the workflow, and our piece on whether Slack removes photo metadata shows how a comparable workplace tool handles the very same file.
Microsoft Teams removes photo metadata now, which is real progress — but it removes EXIF from directly-uploaded images for recipients, and each of those qualifiers is a gap. Strip the file yourself and the qualifiers stop mattering. Try Metadata Cleaner free and share the clean copy.