Holiday Product Photos: A Privacy and AI-Rules Checklist for Sellers

Phone photos can carry the GPS location where they were taken, plus the device model and the date. If you shoot products at your kitchen table, that location is your home. Marketplaces don't document whether they remove this data on upload, so cleaning the files first is the step you control.

Put this season's listing photos in one folder and clean them together with the batch cleaner, or one at a time with the GPS and location remover. Both run in your browser, so the photos are not uploaded to us.

Google Merchant Center requires AI-generated product images to carry the IPTC tag trainedAlgorithmicMedia and says not to remove it (Google). Amazon asks for "contains-synthetic-performer" in the XMP dc:subject field on images of photorealistic AI people (Amazon).

StripShot's standard clean and the batch cleaner remove all EXIF, XMP, IPTC and C2PA data, including these tags, so keep those AI images out of the folder you clean. Details: AI tags you must keep.

Etsy requires AI disclosure in the listing description (Etsy), and every listing needs at least one unedited photo of the real item against a real background, changed only by cropping, resizing, a watermark or a file format change (Etsy). Keep that photo out of AI tools. Etsy says it will begin proactively enforcing the image rules in early 2027, with notice first (Etsy).

The full rules, exceptions and dated changes: Etsy AI rules 2026.

Instagram and Facebook: Meta reads industry-standard AI signals in files and takes self-disclosure. It has said its labels weren't always aligned with people's expectations, and it moved the label for AI-edited content into the post menu in September 2024 (Meta). If a real product photo was labeled, see the Instagram AI info guide.

Pinterest: the "AI modified" label comes from IPTC metadata and from classifiers that can work with no metadata at all. Pinterest says its systems aren't perfect, and a wrong label is appealed through support (Pinterest).

Every platform side by side: AI labels by platform. Cleaning a file does not promise any label outcome, and it never replaces a disclosure a platform requires.

• Etsy: a listing video does not replace the required unedited photo.
• TikTok: realistic AI content must be labeled by the creator, and TikTok says a label it adds can't be removed from the post. It also says the label won't affect distribution as long as the video follows its Community Guidelines.
• Meta: realistic AI video and audio must be self-disclosed.

For location and device data in phone video, use the video cleaner.

The same location data rides along on family photos. See do photos show your location when you send them, posting your kids' Christmas photos and posting holiday travel photos. Made an AI family portrait? Why it says AI info on Facebook.