INSTAGRAM STRIPS YOUR METADATA. YOUR EMAIL DOES NOT.
People hear that Instagram removes photo metadata and relax about the whole topic. That is half right and it is the dangerous half, because the places that do not clean your photos are exactly the places you think about least.
Where metadata usually dies
The big social feeds re-process every image you post. Instagram, Facebook, X and similar platforms compress and resize your photo on their servers, and the metadata gets dropped in the process. The copy strangers can download from your profile is generally clean.
Messaging apps often clean images too, but only in their default photo mode, and this is where it gets sneaky. Send a photo the normal way and it usually gets compressed and cleaned. Send it as a file or document so it keeps full quality, and it arrives exactly as it left your phone, metadata and all. The convenient high quality option is the leaky one.
Where metadata survives just fine
Email does nothing to your attachments. Cloud drives share the original file, that is their whole job. Classifieds and marketplace sites are a mixed bag and you will not know which kind you are dealing with. Forums, blogs, portfolio sites, school portals, job applications, print shops. None of these owe you any cleaning, and most do none.
So the practical rule I follow is simple. Assume nothing strips your metadata, because the moment you rely on a platform to do it, you will share a file some other way and forget.
The boring reliable fix
Clean the photo before it leaves your hands, then it does not matter what the platform does. MetaStrip does this in your browser in a couple of seconds. Drop the photo in, see what it carries, strip it, download the clean copy, share that one.
Nothing uploads, nothing is stored, and for JPEG and PNG the cleaned image is pixel for pixel identical to the original. There is no quality trade at all, so there is no reason not to do it.