Geotag Images WordPress Plugin: What WordPress Keeps
WordPress does not strip the location out of the photo you upload. The original file keeps its GPS coordinates. What a geotag images WordPress plugin cannot control is the set of resized copies WordPress makes a moment later. On many hosts, those copies, not your original, are what visitors download.
Whether they survive is decided by which image library your host installed: an answer you can read off your own site in about thirty seconds.
Does WordPress strip the location out of your photos?
You will find both answers written confidently online, because both are true on different servers. WordPress does not resize images itself. It hands the job to whichever imaging library is available, trying ImageMagick first and falling back to GD.
On the ImageMagick path, WordPress genuinely does run a strip-the-metadata step when it makes a resized copy. That step carries an explicit keep-list, and the photo's EXIF block sits on it, next to the colour profile, the IPTC block and the XMP block. The documented behaviour of that method matches the code in WordPress core, where the keep-list has been unchanged in every release from 4.5 through 6.8. On these hosts, the belief that WordPress destroys your photo's metadata on resize has been wrong for about a decade.
On the GD path, nothing is kept, because GD has no concept of metadata at all. WordPress decodes your photo into raw pixels and writes an entirely new JPEG from them. The coordinates go, and so do the camera, the capture date and your copyright line.
| If Site Health names this editor | Your resized copies keep | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| ImageMagick | Location, camera, copyright and colour profile | The image you serve still knows where it was taken |
| GD | Nothing but the pixels | Every copy visitors load has been wiped clean |
Neither is a setting you chose. It is a property of the hosting you bought. If you want to see what is actually in a file rather than reason about it, you can read the GPS block straight out of the file and settle the question for your own site.
The copy your visitors download is not the file you uploaded
Since WordPress 5.3 there has been a second step most site owners have never noticed. If either side of your image is longer than 2,560 pixels, which covers essentially every photo a current phone takes, WordPress saves a smaller republished version with -scaled added to the filename, and that version becomes the one your pages link to. PNG files skip this step; JPEGs do not.
Your original is not deleted. It stays in the uploads folder, untouched, coordinates intact, and nothing on the front of your site links to it.
So on a GD host the image your visitors download has no location even though your original still does, which is why the advice you followed appears to have done nothing. Meanwhile that original sits on a public web server, reachable by anyone who works out the filename.
What a geotag images WordPress plugin actually changes
Plugins filed under this heading do three different jobs, and the directory listings shelve them together as though they were interchangeable.
- Display plugins read what WordPress already stored and print the camera, exposure or date under the photo. They add no location; they can only show what is there.
- Writing plugins set coordinates, either into the file or into fields attached to the post.
- Visitor geolocation plugins detect where your reader is. This is a different feature that happens to share the word, and it is most of what a search for the category returns.
The constraint no plugin escapes is ordering. Once WordPress has republished a photo through GD, the coordinates are not hiding somewhere recoverable. That copy was built from pixels and never had them. A plugin can add location to the original or to the database, but it cannot put back what was never carried forward. If you want the served image to hold coordinates, they have to be in the file before WordPress makes its copies. For the tags themselves, what geotagging actually writes into a photo covers them.
What WordPress reads from your photo, and what it drops
On upload, WordPress opens the photo and lifts a fixed set of details into the media library: aperture, credit, camera, caption, created timestamp, copyright, focal length, ISO, shutter speed, title, orientation, keywords and alt text. That is the complete list of thirteen fields, and location is not among them.
So even on a host where the coordinates survive in the file, WordPress itself does not know where the photo was taken. No screen in wp-admin will tell you, no field holds it, and nothing warns you when it is there. The location can be present in a file you are serving publicly and completely invisible from inside your own dashboard, which is a large part of why site owners conclude WordPress must have removed it.
Does any of this move your local ranking?
The plugin category is largely sold on this promise, and it has been measured. An agency ran a ten-week controlled test across 27 lawn care businesses, posting to their Google Business Profiles on a fixed schedule for five weeks, then repeating it for five more with coordinates written into the images. Of seven metrics tracked, one improved and four got worse.
The single gain was on "near me" queries inside the areas the coordinates pointed at. The write-up's summary of the trade-off is blunt: "Although it helps the 'near me' queries in those targeted areas, it hurts everywhere you don't add geotagged images."
Geotagging is not a ranking lever, and a plugin sold as one is sold on the wrong benefit. Location data is evidence: a checkable record of where and when a photo was taken. For a contractor documenting a job, an agent with a few hundred property photos, or anyone proving an image is their own, that record is the point.
Check your own site in five minutes
Four steps, in order, using nothing but your own dashboard.
- Open Tools → Site Health → Info → Media and find the row labelled "Active editor".
- If it names GD, treat every resized image on your site as stripped.
- Open your media library in list view and look for
-scaledin the filenames. - Download one image your site actually serves and check whether its coordinates are still there.
What you do next depends on which way you want the file to go. If a photo should carry its location, write the coordinates into the photo before you upload it, so the tags are present before WordPress makes any copies. If a photo should not carry one, such as a picture taken at your home or anything showing a client's address, take the location back out before it goes anywhere near the media library. The original is the file that keeps whatever you decide.
