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shi warren
shi warren

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Most people search “remove location from photo”, not “EXIF”

Most people search “remove location from photo”, not “EXIF”

While building a metadata removal workflow, I realized something interesting:

Most people never search for:

  • EXIF
  • IPTC
  • document properties
  • metadata

They search for:

  • “remove location from photo”
  • “hidden info in PDF”
  • “remove GPS from image”
  • “does this file still contain private data?”

The technical layer and the user intent layer are often completely different.

Developers think in systems.

Users think in outcomes.

That changed how I started thinking about both SEO and product design.

A lot of users are not trying to “inspect metadata”.

They’re usually just at the moment before sharing something publicly and wondering:

“wait… is there still something hidden in this file?”

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