EXIF remover

ImagesSee what a photo is carrying, GPS position, camera and date, then strip it in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and the picture itself is untouched, byte for byte.

Your photo is cleaned on this device and never leaves it. Nothing you open is ever uploaded. There is no server to upload it to.

What this does

Every photo from a phone or camera carries a second document you did not write: where you were standing, to a few metres; when you were there, to the second; what you shoot with; sometimes a small preview made before you cropped. Share the file and all of it goes along, invisibly, to whoever receives it or whatever site stores it.

This tool shows you that document, then removes it. Drop in a JPEG and it lists exactly what was found, the GPS position printed in plain numbers, the camera, the date, block by block with sizes, so you are not taking “metadata removed” on trust. Then it hands you a clean copy to download. The picture itself is not re-encoded, recompressed or touched in any way: the image data is copied byte for byte, and only the wrapping changes.

Everything happens in your browser. There is no server that could receive your photo, which for a privacy tool is the only honest architecture: a cleaner that uploads your photo in order to clean it has already shared the thing you were trying to contain.

How to use it

  1. Drop a JPEG onto the tool, or choose one from your files. The format is read from the file’s own bytes, so a mislabelled extension does not matter.
  2. Read the report. It names each block that was removed and what the camera metadata said, with the GPS position, if there was one, printed where you cannot miss it.
  3. Press “Download clean copy”. The file is named after the original, so photo.jpg comes back as photo-clean.jpg. If there was nothing to remove, the tool says the file is already clean instead of handing you a pointless copy.

What a photo actually carries

EXIF is the block cameras write: make, model, lens, exposure settings, date and time, and, when location is on, latitude and longitude as coordinates. It also usually holds an embedded thumbnail, which is its own quiet trap: the thumbnail is generated when the photo is taken, so a photo you later cropped can still carry a miniature of what you cropped out.

XMP and IPTC are editing metadata: captions, keywords, edit history, and often a copy of the same dates and places, written by photo software rather than the camera. Cleaning EXIF and leaving these is a common way for removers to leak what they promised to remove, so this tool takes them too.

Data appended after the image is the newest arrival. Some phones tuck extra content beyond the JPEG’s formal end, most notably motion photos: a short video clip, with sound, of the moments around the shot. It can be megabytes, it survives most naive cleaners because it is outside the structure they look at, and a clip of your voice and surroundings is a sharper leak than any coordinate. This tool walks to the true end of the image and drops everything after it.

What is kept, and why

The rule inside the tool is a keep-list, not a remove-list, because the mistakes are not symmetric: keeping an unknown vendor block quietly defeats the whole point, while removing one merely costs the file some baggage. Three things pass, because decoders need them to draw the picture correctly: the JFIF header, the colour profile (without which wide-gamut photos shift colour), and Adobe’s colour-transform marker. Every other ancillary block goes, named in the report as it leaves.

One fact is rebuilt rather than kept: which way up the photo goes. Phones store the image as the sensor saw it and flag the rotation in EXIF, so stripping EXIF naively makes portrait photos lie on their side, and the classic fix, re-encoding the rotated pixels, is exactly the quality loss this tool promises not to inflict. Instead it writes a fresh 36-byte block containing the orientation number and nothing else. The report says when it has done this, and a second pass over a cleaned file recognises the block and reports the file clean rather than pretending to find something.

When it matters

The photos that deserve cleaning are the ones going to strangers with the context still attached: the sofa you are selling, photographed in your living room; the listing for the flat; the lost cat poster; the photo shared on a forum under a username your neighbours do not know. In each case the picture is meant to be public and the coordinates of your home are not. Cleaning is also worth a thought before sending originals to people you do trust, because files forwarded onwards travel with everything intact.

Limitations

JPEG only. That is where cameras and phones put EXIF, so it is where the problem lives. Formats that rarely carry personal metadata are not pretended to be part of it.

The pixels can still talk. Street signs, reflections, faces and whatever is on the whiteboard are content, not metadata, and no metadata tool touches them. Timestamps stamped onto the image by the camera are pixels too.

It cannot recall copies. Cleaning helps the files you have not shared yet; anything already sent is already out with its data aboard.

Unreadable metadata is removed wholesale. If a file’s EXIF is too damaged to parse, it is still stripped, but the orientation cannot be read out of it first, so a sideways-stored photo with broken EXIF may come back needing a manual rotate. The report shows nothing for a block it could not read, rather than guessing.

Frequently asked questions

Are my photos uploaded anywhere?

No. The cleaner runs entirely inside your browser and nothing is ever sent to a server. That matters twice over for this tool: a metadata remover that worked by uploading your photo would hand the location data to a stranger in order to remove it. Watch your browser's network panel while you clean a photo and you will see nothing carrying it leave.

Will the photo lose any quality?

No, and not in the way compressors mean it: the image is not re-encoded at all. The compressed picture data is copied byte for byte, and only the file's header changes. Compare the cleaned file with the original in any image viewer and the pixels are identical, because they are the same bytes.

Why does my photo stay the right way up?

One number survives the cleaning: the EXIF orientation, which tells software which way to turn the photo. Phones usually store the sensor image sideways and rely on that flag, so removing it would make portraits lie down. The tool writes it back as a fresh block that contains that single number and nothing else, and the report says so.

What about screenshots, PNG or WebP files?

This tool reads JPEGs, because that is where cameras and phones write EXIF, GPS included. Screenshots are PNGs and carry no location data to begin with. PNG and WebP can technically hold metadata of their own, and if you convert or re-encode one with any of this site's image tools it is rebuilt from pixels and the metadata does not come along.

Does social media not remove EXIF for me?

The big platforms generally re-encode uploads and drop metadata in the process, though that is their policy rather than your guarantee. What catches people out is everything else: email attachments, cloud drive links, auction listings and files sent "as document" in chat apps usually travel exactly as they left you. Cleaning before sharing also means the platform itself never receives the data.

Can it remove just the date and keep the rest?

No, deliberately. Metadata blocks cross-reference each other, and editing inside them is where cleaners develop bugs that leak the very thing they promised to remove. This tool removes whole blocks and tells you what they contained; the one exception, orientation, is rebuilt from scratch rather than edited in place.