Photo EXIF remover
A photo file holds more than the picture, and sometimes that includes the exact spot where it was taken. This tool lists everything it found in yours, location first, and gives you a copy with those parts cut out and the image untouched.
The files are opened and rewritten by your own browser. No photo is uploaded, and nothing remains once you close the page.
A photo file is a picture plus a set of labels
Picture a printed photograph with notes on the back: the date, the place, who took it. A digital photo has the same notes. The difference is that the camera writes them without asking, and you never get to turn the photo over.
Inside the file, the compressed picture is one block among several. The rest are metadata blocks, each in its own format:
- EXIF
- Written by the camera or phone: date and time, make and model, lens, exposure settings, and on a phone with location turned on, GPS latitude, longitude and altitude. Many cameras add the body and lens serial numbers and an owner name.
- XMP
- Written by editing software such as Lightroom or Photoshop: author, title, city and country, the editing history, and sometimes rectangles around faces with a name attached to each.
- IPTC
- The press standard: caption, credit, keywords, contact details.
- Maker notes and comments
- A block in a format private to each manufacturer, plus free-text comment fields in JPEG and PNG.
How to read the report
Each photo you add gets a card with a count of the items found and a color for the most sensitive one.
- Red: a GPS position. Phone coordinates are usually accurate to a few meters, which is enough to identify a home. The card shows them to five decimal places, with a map link that only opens if you click it.
- Yellow: items that identify a person or a device. Author, camera owner, serial numbers, a unique image ID, a place name, IPTC fields, named face regions. A serial number looks harmless, but it’s the same in every photo from that camera, so it ties an anonymous picture to all your others.
- No color: technical details. Model, lens, shutter speed, software.
If the file contains an embedded thumbnail, the card displays it. This small preview is stored separately from the main picture, and some editors don’t regenerate it. So a photo you cropped or blurred may still be carrying a thumbnail of the original.
What the clean copy keeps and drops
The tool doesn’t open the picture and save it again. That would recompress it and cost you quality. It walks through the file block by block and copies only the ones that belong to the image.
| Format | Removed |
|---|---|
| JPEG | EXIF, XMP, IPTC, comments, every other application segment, and any data after the end-of-image marker (motion photo video, depth map, HDR gain map) |
| PNG | The tEXt, zTXt, iTXt, eXIf and tIME chunks |
| WebP | The EXIF and XMP chunks, with the file header flags corrected to match |
| HEIC, AVIF | Everything, by conversion: the browser decodes the image and saves a new JPEG at 92% quality |
Two things are kept on purpose. The orientation flag is rewritten into a minimal block of its own, because without it a portrait photo would show up on its side. The color profile stays if the box is checked. It describes how to display the colors and says nothing about you.
After cleaning, the tool analyzes its own output and tells you whether anything is left. If you cleaned several photos at once, you get them as a single .zip file.
What removing metadata can’t do
Metadata is only one of the ways a photo gives away a place. A street sign, a shop front, a reflection in a window or a recognizable skyline are in the pixels, and this tool doesn’t touch pixels. It doesn’t remove a visible watermark or a date stamp printed onto the image either.
HEIC and AVIF conversion only works if your browser can display those formats. Safari can. Other browsers often can’t, and in that case the card explains how to export a JPEG from the phone instead.
You can also stop the location from being recorded in the first place. On an iPhone, go to Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services › Camera › Never. On Android, open the camera app’s settings and turn off location tags.
Questions people ask
Do Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp remove EXIF data?
The large social networks and WhatsApp strip metadata from the copy other people see when you post or send a photo the normal way, although the service itself receives the original. Email attachments, cloud folder links, WordPress and other CMS uploads, forums and photos sent “as a file” or “as a document” in chat apps usually keep everything.
Does a screenshot contain EXIF data?
A screenshot has no GPS position or camera details. It can still hold a creation date and the name of the software, and on some systems a text chunk. Drop it here and you’ll see exactly what’s inside.
Will removing metadata reduce the quality of my photo?
Not for JPEG, PNG or WebP. The image data is copied byte for byte and only the surrounding blocks are left out, so the file gets slightly smaller and looks identical. HEIC and AVIF are the exception. They’re converted to JPEG, which re-encodes the picture once.
Why do the colors look different after I removed the color profile?
Recent phones save photos in a wide color space such as Display P3. Without the profile, software assumes standard sRGB and the picture looks flat or oversaturated. Leave the color profile box checked unless you need the smallest possible file.
Are my photos uploaded to your server?
No. JavaScript in your browser reads the files and creates the clean copies in its memory. Load the page, disconnect from the network and the tool still works.
How do I see the EXIF data of a photo without any tool?
On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties and open the Details tab. On a Mac, open it in Preview and press ⌘I. On an iPhone, swipe up on the photo in the Photos app. These views show the common fields but not XMP history, maker notes or the embedded thumbnail.