The main metadata families
EXIF holds camera and capture details. IPTC carries newsroom-style fields like captions, creator, and copyright. XMP is Adobe's extensible container, often storing edit history and AI-generation provenance labels. ICC profiles describe color. A single file can carry all four at once.
Screenshots and exported graphics usually carry very little metadata; photos straight from a camera or phone carry the most.
Checking and removing it
Because metadata lives in its own segments of the file, it can be listed and deleted without re-encoding the pixels. That makes inspection and removal fast and completely lossless.