Remove EXIF Data

What your photos are actually carrying

A photograph taken on a modern phone is not just an image. Embedded in the file is an EXIF block recording the camera make and model, the exact date and time, the exposure settings, the lens, sometimes the device's serial number — and, if location services were on, the GPS coordinates where you were standing.

Those coordinates are typically accurate to within a few metres. A photo of a pet in a living room, posted to a forum, can place the photographer's home to the specific building. A picture of a car for sale locates the seller's driveway. A holiday photograph uploaded while still away announces that the house is empty.

This is not hypothetical. Location metadata in shared photographs has been used to find people who did not want to be found, and it is one of the most consistently underestimated privacy exposures in ordinary use — precisely because it is invisible. Nothing in a photo viewer suggests the coordinates are there.

Many social platforms strip EXIF on upload. Many do not. Email attachments, messaging apps that send "as file", cloud links, forums, marketplace listings and direct file transfers usually preserve it in full.

See it before you strip it

Most metadata removers are a single button. That is a missed opportunity, because the interesting question is not "can this be removed" but "what was in there in the first place".

This tool lists every field it finds, marks the identifying ones, and if GPS coordinates are present it shows them and offers a map link so you can see for yourself how precisely you are being located. People are consistently surprised by that step, and it changes how they handle photos afterwards.

It is also a useful diagnostic in the other direction. If you receive a photograph and want to know when and on what it was taken, the same reading tells you — and unlike a server-side EXIF viewer, examining somebody's photograph here does not involve uploading it anywhere.

Removed without re-compressing

This is the part that matters technically. The usual way a browser tool strips metadata is to draw the image onto a canvas and re-encode it. That does remove the metadata — and it also re-compresses the photograph, throwing away image quality every time, because a JPEG cannot be re-encoded losslessly.

This tool works differently. A JPEG is a sequence of segments: metadata blocks, then the compressed image data. The metadata segments are simply cut out, and the compressed scan data is copied through byte for byte into the new file.

The result is a photograph whose pixels are bit-for-bit identical to the original, in a file that is smaller by exactly the size of the metadata that was removed. There is no generation loss, no quality setting to choose, and nothing to trade off.

The size reduction is often larger than expected. A photo with an embedded thumbnail preview, GPS data and a full maker-note block can carry 40 to 100 KB of metadata.

What is kept, and what to know

One field is deliberately worth understanding: orientation. Phones record the angle at which the photo was taken and rely on the viewer to rotate it. Strip that flag and some viewers display the photo sideways. Because this tool removes the whole metadata block, a photo that was relying on the orientation flag may appear rotated afterwards — rotate it yourself before stripping if that matters.

Removal is irreversible. If a photograph's date or location is genuinely valuable to you — for a claim, a record, or an archive — keep the original somewhere safe and share the cleaned copy.

This handles JPEG, which is what phones produce and where the exposure is greatest. PNG and WebP carry far less metadata by design, and HEIC files are best converted to JPEG first. And bear in mind the image itself can be identifying regardless of metadata: a street sign, a house number or a recognisable view says as much as any coordinate.