What happens to a photo you post here

Short version: we take the hidden location tag off every photo before it goes anywhere, and we never publish the file you uploaded — only a copy we made from it.

The problem with phone photos

When you take a picture, your phone writes a block of invisible information into the image file alongside the picture itself. Photographers call it EXIF data. It records the camera, the settings, the date and time — and, unless you have turned location services off for the camera, the latitude and longitude of the exact spot you were standing.

That coordinate is precise to within a few meters. It does not show up when you look at the photo. It travels with the file when you email it, text it, or upload it, and plenty of websites republish it without ever stripping it out.

On a housing board that matters more than almost anywhere else. A listing here might say women's shared room, available in January, moving out mid‑contract. If the photo of that room still carried its GPS tag, a stranger could pull the exact address out of a picture of a bedspread. That is not a risk we are willing to pass on to a nineteen‑year‑old trying to sell a contract.

What we actually do

1. Your photo arrives with the rest of your listing.
2. Before it is shown to anyone — including us — we open the file and delete the metadata blocks where location lives: EXIF, XMP and IPTC on a JPEG; the equivalent chunks on a PNG or WebP.
3. We then check our own work. The stripped file is scanned for the signatures those blocks leave behind. If any of it survived, the photo is refused rather than published, and you get an email telling you which photo and why.
4. Only the cleaned copy is uploaded to our image host. The file you sent is never stored on the site and never linked from it.
5. Every picture on the site is then re-rendered again at display size, which strips anything hypothetically left a second time.

A person still reviews your listing before it goes live, and now sees your photos while doing it — so a picture that shows a house number, a piece of mail, or a face you did not mean to include gets caught by a human before the listing publishes, not after.

What we can't check

We accept JPEG, PNG and WebP, because those are the formats we can open and verify. If you upload an iPhone HEIC file we refuse it and ask for a JPEG instead — not because HEIC is worse, but because we would be guessing, and a guess is not good enough for this. Most phones hand a web form a JPEG anyway.

And the obvious one: we can strip what is hidden in the file, not what is visible in the picture. If the shot includes your street sign, your building number, your car's plate or your roommate's face, that is in the photograph itself. Have a look before you send it.

Sizes, and why the form nags you

You can attach up to three photos, and all of them together need to stay under 7 MB. That is not us being stingy — the service that receives the form rejects anything larger before it reaches us, and it does it rudely: a blank error page, and everything you typed gone. So the form adds up your photos as you pick them and tells you before you hit submit rather than after.

Three photos straight off a recent phone can easily clear that on their own. If you are over, the simplest fix is to share them at a smaller size — most phones offer “Medium” or “Small” when you share a picture, and at that size a room still looks like a room.

Taking a photo down

The email you get when your listing goes live has a link that takes the whole listing down in one tap, photos included — and photos included means the picture is deleted from where it was stored, not just hidden from the page. You do not need an account and you do not need to ask us. If you only want one picture gone rather than the whole listing, take it down with that link and post it again without the photo you did not want up — that is faster than waiting on us, and it is the only way that puts you in control of it rather than us.

Posting on Provo.com is free. We don't hold money, take a commission, or sell your details. List a housing contract · Post a classified · Submit an event