Remove EXIF Data from Photos

Controls and Method

What Photos Actually Carry

A JPEG is not just an image. Alongside the compressed picture sit metadata blocks the camera wrote at capture time. The most consequential is the GPS block: latitude and longitude, often to around a metre, sometimes with altitude and a bearing. A photo taken in your kitchen carries your home address in a form anyone can read with a right-click.

The rest is less dramatic but more identifying than people expect. Make and model say what device you own. The body serial number is unique to your specific camera, which links every photo you have ever published from it into one set. DateTimeOriginal gives the exact second, which is enough to correlate a photo with a location, a transaction, or a shift pattern. The software field records what edited it, which can reveal a workflow you would rather not advertise.

None of this is hypothetical or new: it is simply how the format works, and it is why the reveal comes before the removal here. The point is not to alarm you. It is that most people have never seen the record their own photos carry, and it is hard to make an informed decision about a file until you have.

Which Platforms Strip Metadata and Which Do Not

Large social platforms generally strip EXIF when they process an upload, because they re-encode images for their own delivery pipelines. Facebook, Instagram, X and WhatsApp all re-encode, and the GPS block does not survive that. Do not read this as protection: they strip the copy they serve to other people, while having received the original, coordinates included.

The places that commonly do not strip are the ones that matter most for accidental disclosure. A file emailed as an attachment arrives exactly as it left your device. A photo uploaded to your own website, a forum, a marketplace listing, a shared drive, a cloud folder link, or a support ticket is usually stored as-is. Messaging apps that offer to send "as a file" or "original quality" preserve everything by design — that is what the option means.

The practical rule: assume metadata travels unless you know the destination re-encodes. Strip it yourself and you do not have to know. If the photo is also going to be compressed before publishing or scaled down for a web page, do the metadata pass first: those tools re-encode from decoded pixels and drop most fields as a side effect, but a side effect is not a guarantee, and this tool tells you what was there.

What This Tool Removes, and What It Cannot

Removed, and verifiable afterwards by loading the cleaned file back into this page: the EXIF block including GPS, XMP packets, IPTC records, and JPEG comment segments. Reading the output again shows nothing left to report.

Kept deliberately: the ICC colour profile. It is not personal data, and stripping it changes how the photo renders. A tool that quietly shifted your colours while claiming only to remove hidden data would be doing something you did not ask for.

Not reachable at all, and worth being clear about. Content visible in the picture is not metadata: a street sign, a house number, a name badge or a screen reflection stays exactly where it is, and no metadata tool touches it. If a copy of the photo has already been sent somewhere, cleaning your local copy does nothing about the one they have. And HEIC files from an iPhone use a container this tool does not rewrite — convert it to JPG first, then clean the result.

How It Works

A JPEG is a sequence of labelled segments. The picture lives in one of them; the metadata lives in others, each introduced by a two-byte marker and a length. Reading the file is a matter of walking that chain and reporting what the marked segments contain, which is why the tool can show you the GPS block before it touches anything.

Removing is the same walk with the metadata segments left out of the copy. The compressed image data is never decoded — it is copied from input to output byte for byte — so there is no encoder involved and no opportunity for quality to change. This is the difference between stripping metadata and re-saving the photo through a converter: both end up with a cleaner file, but only one of them leaves the pixels mathematically identical.

The whole walk happens in a Web Worker, on a copy of the file held in your browser’s memory. Nothing is uploaded, and the original file on disk is never modified: you get a new file to download and keep the old one until you decide otherwise.

Why Screenshots Are Different from Camera Photos

Screenshots and camera photos carry almost opposite risks, and treating them the same way leads people to worry about the wrong file. A screenshot is generated by the operating system, not by a camera: there is no lens, no GPS receiver and no shutter involved, so it has no coordinates, no camera make or model and no body serial number. What it usually has is a creation timestamp and sometimes the name of the software that produced it. Running one through this tool is quick and harmless, but it is rarely the file that needed it.

The real exposure in a screenshot is on the surface, in the pixels, and no metadata tool can reach it. A browser screenshot shows the URL bar, open tabs, bookmarks, the account name in the corner, an email address in a header, notification banners from other conversations. That is visible content, not hidden data, and the fix is cropping the frame down to just the part you meant to share before you send it.

Camera photos are the reverse: the picture may be entirely innocuous while the file quietly names your street, your device and the second you stood there. That is the case this tool exists for. There is also a format trap in the middle — screenshots on macOS and Windows are PNG, phone photos are JPEG or HEIC — so if you are collecting both into one place, converting the PNGs to JPG first gives you a single format to reason about instead of three.

Worked Examples

A 4.2 MB iPhone photo of a bicycle for a marketplace listing, taken in the garage. The reveal shows latitude and longitude accurate to a few metres, resolving to the home address; Apple iPhone 15 Pro as make and model; a capture time of 18:42 on a Tuesday. The cleaned file is 4.19 MB — about 12 KB smaller, which is the exact size of the metadata that was removed. The picture is byte-identical, and the listing no longer tells 40,000 strangers where the bicycle sleeps.

A Windows screenshot of an error dialog for a support ticket, saved as PNG. The reveal shows a creation timestamp and nothing else: no coordinates, no device. Stripping it changes almost nothing, which is the honest answer. The useful step on this file is looking at what is actually in frame — the taskbar, the other open windows, the file path in the title bar — and cropping accordingly.

A photo edited on a desktop before publishing under a pseudonym. The reveal shows the original camera serial number and the editing software, both preserved through the edit because most editors copy EXIF forward. The serial number is the one that matters: it is unique to that camera body and links this photo to every other picture published from it, including the ones published under a real name. Removing it breaks the join.

Important Edge Cases

• A photo that relied on the EXIF orientation tag to display upright can appear rotated after cleaning, because that tag is part of the EXIF block being removed. Rotate the image before stripping if it matters.
• PNG files carry far less than JPEGs — usually a timestamp and a software field, occasionally a text chunk — so a cleaned PNG often looks barely different in size. That is expected, not a failure.
• Editing an already-cleaned photo in most desktop editors writes fresh metadata on save, including the software name and a new timestamp. Clean last, not first.
• HEIC and AVIF use a container this tool does not rewrite, so they are rejected rather than silently passed through unchanged. Convert to JPG first and clean the result.
• The ICC color profile is deliberately kept. It is not personal data, and removing it would visibly shift the colors of the picture — a change you did not ask a metadata tool to make.

Checking the Result Yourself

Do not take the tool's word for it. Drop the cleaned file back into this page: it should report no metadata blocks at all. On a Mac you can also select the file, press Command-I and look under More Info; on Windows, right-click, Properties, Details. Both will show the camera and GPS fields on the original and nothing on the cleaned copy.

To confirm the picture is unchanged, compare the two files side by side at full zoom. They are pixel-identical, because the compressed image data was copied rather than re-encoded — the cleaned file is smaller only by the size of the metadata that was cut out.

Practical Uses

• Remove your home coordinates from a photo before listing an item for sale
• Strip camera serial numbers from images published under a pseudonym
• Clean screenshots and photos before attaching them to a support ticket
• Prepare images for a website without shipping capture times and device details