Photos, and the Metadata Leak That Scared Me Straight
Every item gets photographed on my phone. I shoot in a Travor light box; it lights the item evenly, breaks down small, and stores flat. And credit where it's due: Apple improves the iPhone camera meaningfully every year, so the raw input keeps getting better for free.
From there a pipeline takes over. It normalizes the photos, renames them to a consistent scheme, and pushes them to Cloudflare R2 (cheap object storage; I've paid about $2 total in a year of going over the free tier) where my listings reference them.
The part every home seller needs to hear
Phone photos embed metadata: GPS coordinates, shutter speed, aperture, timestamps. Which means every casual listing photo you shoot in your living room is quietly stamped with where you live. I found this out the hard way. When I audited my old listings and realized how many location-tagged photos I'd already published to the open internet, I purged and re-uploaded every single one.
How the leak happened is its own cautionary tale. I was exporting photos as HEIF
(Apple's format), which nothing on Windows really reads, so I converted them to JPEG
with ImageMagick. (I started with PNG because it's
patent-unencumbered; after some back-and-forth with an AI about it, I came around to
JPEG for the simple reason that it's universally supported and causes no headaches.)
The catch: ImageMagick doesn't strip metadata unless you tell it to. So the EXIF data
rode along, and rclone, the sync tool moving my folder up to R2,
dutifully uploaded all of it. It also uploaded my .md and
.csv working files, because I hadn't yet figured out how to exclude file
types. There wasn't much in those, but it was more than I want on a public bucket, and
it's just bad hygiene.
Once I understood I'd been leaking, I fixed it at the source: the conversion step
now strips all metadata to null, and rclone is configured to never
upload .csv or .md files. Now if you pull one of my listing
photos, it's completely sanitized: only the pixels, nothing about me.
If you sell online from your home and take one thing from this whole series: check your photo metadata.