TL;DR: Yes — Squarespace strips EXIF camera data and embedded color profiles from photos when it processes uploads into its responsive image variants. But there are two exceptions worth understanding. First, since May 2020 Squarespace deliberately preserves the XMP WebStatement and Licensor fields on every upload, keeping images eligible for Google's Licensable badge. Second, if the site owner has enabled "Image Metadata Importing" in Developer Tools, Squarespace reads titles, descriptions, tags, and GPS latitude/longitude out of JPEG EXIF and IPTC blocks before stripping — and republishes them as visible page content. So your metadata doesn't always disappear on upload; sometimes it gets converted into text on the page. If a photo contains coordinates or client data you'd rather not publish, strip it yourself before it ever touches the platform.
Squarespace powers a huge share of photography portfolios, and that makes this question more consequential than it looks. A portfolio site is exactly the place where photographers upload full-resolution, metadata-rich exports straight from Lightroom — files carrying GPS coordinates from location shoots, camera serial numbers, client names in IPTC caption fields, and copyright notices they may actually want to keep.
We looked at what Squarespace's own documentation says, what its image pipeline does in practice, and where the platform's history with metadata got genuinely contentious. The answer turns out to be more layered than a simple yes or no — and which layer matters depends on whether you care more about privacy or about copyright.
What happens to EXIF data when you upload to Squarespace?
When you upload an image, Squarespace doesn't serve your original file to visitors. It re-processes the upload into a set of responsive variants at multiple widths, and its CDN serves whichever size fits the visitor's screen. That re-encoding step is where metadata dies: EXIF blocks — camera make and model, lens data, exposure settings, capture timestamps, and GPS coordinates — along with embedded ICC color profiles are stripped from the derivative files Squarespace actually delivers.
This is the same architectural pattern we've documented across most large platforms: metadata removal is a byproduct of image re-processing, not a dedicated privacy feature. The pipeline exists to optimize delivery. Privacy is incidental. If you're new to what EXIF actually contains, our plain-English guide to what EXIF data is covers the full structure.
The practical upshot for site visitors: if they right-click and save an image from a published Squarespace page, the file they get generally carries no camera EXIF and no GPS. In that narrow sense, Squarespace behaves like Instagram or Facebook — the public-facing copy is scrubbed.
But "the public copy is scrubbed" is not the same as "your metadata is gone." Two mechanisms complicate the picture.
Photo by George Milton on Pexels.
Which metadata does Squarespace deliberately keep?
Here's where Squarespace differs from almost every other platform we've covered — and the difference exists because photographers fought for it.
In early 2020, Google introduced the Licensable badge for Google Images. To qualify, an image file must carry two XMP rights fields: a WebStatement (a URL stating your rights, sometimes called Copyright Info URL) and a Licensor URL (where someone can license the photo). Squarespace's pipeline at the time stripped all XMP — which meant no Squarespace-hosted photo could ever earn the badge. Photographer Penny Gentieu documented the problem in a widely shared PetaPixel piece, and within two days Squarespace shipped a fix, confirming: "Going forward, this metadata will not be removed from images uploaded to the platform."
Today, Squarespace's own documentation states that all uploaded images automatically include WebStatement and Licensor metadata — even when metadata importing is switched off. It doesn't display on your site, but it rides along in the served files to keep them eligible for Google's image-license features.
This matters for how you think about the question in the title. Squarespace strips metadata selectively. Camera data and GPS get discarded as pipeline byproduct; machine-readable licensing rights get preserved as a deliberate product decision. Whether that trade favors you depends on which side of the copyright equation you're on — we've written before about why many photographers want copyright metadata to survive exactly this kind of processing.
Can Squarespace import your GPS coordinates instead of deleting them?
Yes — and this is the part most Squarespace users have never heard of.
Buried in the Developer Tools panel is a setting called Enable Image Metadata Importing. It exists as a convenience for photographers: with it enabled, Squarespace reads metadata out of uploaded .jpeg and .jpg files (stored to the EXIF ISO and IPTC standards) and maps it into the site's own content fields, so you don't have to retype titles and captions. Per Squarespace's documentation, the import covers image titles (capped at 64 characters), descriptions, tags, and — critically — GPS longitude and latitude.
Think about what that means mechanically. The EXIF block still gets stripped from the served image files. But its contents were harvested first, and they resurface as structured data attached to your gallery: on version 7.0 gallery pages, location data appears in the image editor's Location tab, and titles, descriptions, and tags become visible page content.
So the honest answer to "does Squarespace remove photo metadata?" has a fork in it. With importing disabled (the default), embedded metadata is discarded. With importing enabled, the most sensitive field in the entire EXIF spec — the precise coordinates of where you stood when you pressed the shutter — is extracted and retained in your site's CMS. If you photograph at your home studio and enabled this setting years ago, coordinates for your house may be attached to gallery items right now. Our breakdown of how GPS coordinates get embedded in photos explains why those numbers are accurate to within a few meters.
What should photographers do before uploading to Squarespace?
The pattern we recommend is the same one we've laid out for delivering photos to clients: decide what a file should disclose before it leaves your machine, rather than trusting a platform's pipeline to make that decision for you.
For a Squarespace portfolio, that breaks into two cases.
If you want the Licensable badge, embed your WebStatement, Licensor URL, Copyright Notice, Creator, and Credit fields in Lightroom or Photoshop before export — Squarespace will preserve the rights fields it needs. Strip everything else you don't want harvested: GPS, serial numbers, client identifiers in caption fields.
If you just want clean files, strip everything. Here's the fastest way to do it:
- Open Metadata Cleaner in any browser. Processing happens locally on your device — your portfolio images never upload to anyone's server, including ours.
- Drag in the photos you plan to publish. Batch mode handles a full gallery at once, and JPEG, PNG, HEIC, and WebP are all supported.
- Inspect the report. You'll see exactly what your Lightroom export carried: GPS coordinates, capture times, camera body serial number, editing history.
- Clean, download, and upload the stripped copies to Squarespace. Now the metadata-importing toggle is irrelevant — there's nothing left to import.
Sixty seconds of hygiene, and the question of what Squarespace's pipeline does or doesn't strip stops mattering for your privacy entirely.
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.
What stripping does not protect you from
We try to be precise about limits in every one of these platform write-ups, and Squarespace has a few worth naming.
Stripping file metadata does nothing about page-level disclosure. If your gallery caption says "Shot at my home studio in Asheville," no EXIF scrubber can help you — the location is in the content, not the container. The same goes for alt text, image filenames like smith-wedding-lakehouse-042.jpg, and blog post text.
It also doesn't rewind anything already published. If you enabled metadata importing in the past, previously harvested titles, tags, and GPS data live in your site's content fields until you edit or delete them there. Cleaning future uploads won't touch that backlog — audit your existing galleries, especially the Location tab on older 7.0 gallery pages.
And it doesn't remove provenance systems designed to survive stripping. C2PA Content Credentials embedded by newer cameras and Adobe tools are built as cryptographically signed manifests, and stripping workflows that handle EXIF don't always account for them — we covered the mechanics in our guide to C2PA Content Credentials. Metadata Cleaner removes the embedded JUMBF manifest along with EXIF, IPTC, and XMP, but a platform-side match against Adobe's cloud registry is outside any local tool's reach.
The verdict
Squarespace removes photo metadata — mostly. EXIF camera data, GPS, and color profiles are stripped from the image files it serves, while XMP licensing fields (WebStatement and Licensor) are deliberately re-embedded so photographers keep their Google Licensable eligibility. The asterisk is the Image Metadata Importing setting, which converts embedded titles, descriptions, tags, and GPS coordinates into CMS content before the strip happens.
That makes Squarespace one of the more photographer-considerate platforms we've reviewed in this series — it's the only one so far that reversed a metadata decision because photographers pushed back. This post continues our portfolio-platform series; if you host work on Adobe's builder instead, our Adobe Portfolio metadata breakdown covers how Behance-side processing handles the same question.
But considerate is not the same as controlled. The only pipeline you fully control is the one that runs before upload. Strip your files first, embed only the rights fields you want the world to read, and treat every platform's processing as something you route around rather than rely on.
Try Metadata Cleaner free — clean a whole gallery's worth of photos in your browser before they ever reach your website builder.