Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Like the Samsung Galaxy S25, Google’s new Pixel 10 series is adopting C2PA metadata for digital media authenticity. Anytime the phones take a photo or edit it, they embed a watermark in the final image that traces its origin and any changes made to it. Google, like Samsung, is following this standard to help combat all inevitable confusion around an image’s provenance and veracity on the internet. Is this photo real or AI? Or is it real with AI embellishments? C2PA metadata answers these questions.
When I received my Google Pixel 10 Pro, I wondered: Can I remove this data? Can I edit it or fake it? So I installed exiftool and started digging. What I discovered is both alarming and comforting in different ways.
How the Pixel 10 saves and shows C2PA metadata
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
All apps and websites have to be updated with C2PA metadata support to be able to attach it to an image or read it. On the Google Pixel 10, both Pixel Camera and Google Photos have this new feature, so they can append and read an image’s provenance and manipulation log. However, all of my transferred Pixel 9-and-earlier photos don’t show any C2PA metadata, even when I view them on the Pixel 10. That’s because the camera app on older Pixels didn’t embed the watermark from the start. If I edit them with Photos on the Pixel 10, though, they’ll show that they were altered.
Concretely, any new photo I take with the Pixel 10 will show a Media captured with a camera in the Google Photos app. Panoramas even specify Media captured with a camera, multiple images were combined. That’s your sign that a photo is as real as it could be.
Photos C2PA explainer Regular photo Panorama
If it’s not a straight pic but something like a portrait or long exposure, where there’s no generation of any kind, just a simple manipulation, there’s an extra Edited with non-AI tools mention. Even Add Me shots fall in this category because they composite something real straight from the camera. The same tag also shows up if I use Google Photos for simple edits like cropping, changing brightness, or applying filters.
Portrait photo 100x Pro Res Zoom Edited with Magic Editor
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