When it is worth checking first
- Selling something on a marketplace, where the product photo was taken at home and the buyer is a stranger.
- Putting rental or property photos online without the address travelling with them.
- Emailing photos to a contact you do not know well, where the attachment passes through inboxes you do not control.
- Sharing pictures of your children beyond the family group chat, and wanting to be sure no coordinates near their school came along.
- Delivering photos to a client and wanting the body serial number and editing software gone while the shooting settings stay.
What a photo actually carries
Cameras and phones write a pile of capture information into the file when they save it. None of it is visible in the picture, and all of it is readable by anyone holding the file. The tool sorts it into five groups, because the decision you are making is not “delete this tag” but “do I want people to know this”.
| Group | What is in it | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Location | GPS coordinates and altitude, usually precise enough for a specific door rather than a neighbourhood. | Highest |
| Identity | Body and lens serial numbers, owner name, author, editing software, keywords. | High |
| Time | When it was taken, when it was digitised, the time zone offset. | Medium |
| Camera settings | Aperture, shutter, ISO, focal length, lens model. | Low |
| Technical | Dimensions, colour space, orientation. Removing these causes problems. | None |
Serial numbers are the underrated one. A serial is not personal data by itself, but it behaves like a stable fingerprint: line up photos posted from different platforms under different handles, match the serials, and you have shown they came from one camera.
Why this tool does not re-encode
Most online EXIF removers work like this: draw the image into a canvas, then export a new JPEG. That does strip the metadata, and it also re-compresses the entire photograph. JPEG is lossy, so every extra save costs some detail, and after a few rounds the edges start to block up.
The approach here works on the bytes. A JPEG is a series of segments; metadata lives in APP1, APP13 and friends, while the compressed pixel data sits after the SOS marker. Cleaning simply rebuilds a file without those segments, copying the pixel data across untouched, so the quality does not change at all — the file just gets smaller. PNG works the same way with chunks instead of segments.
Three traps worth knowing about
- Delete the orientation tag and the photo turns sideways. Many phones store the image rotated and use
Orientationto say how far to turn it. Wiping the whole EXIF block causes exactly that. This tool treats orientation as a display instruction rather than metadata and keeps it whatever you tick. - The embedded thumbnail can be the pre-edit picture. EXIF can hold a small preview, and some editors update the main image while forgetting the thumbnail. The person you cropped out, or the house number you blurred, can survive in miniature. Thumbnails are always removed here, with no option to keep them.
- Maker notes cannot be moved.
MakerNoteis a proprietary block that often holds the body serial and shutter count, and its internal offsets are measured from the original file, so relocating it breaks it. It is always discarded when the EXIF is rebuilt.
EXIF, XMP and IPTC are not the same thing
- EXIF is written by the camera as a miniature TIFF. GPS and capture settings live here, and so does the overwhelming majority of the risk.
- XMP is Adobe’s XML format, written by editing software. Expect editing history, ratings, and sometimes an author name.
- IPTC holds the press and stock photography fields: caption, credit, contact details.
- ICC is not metadata at all but a colour profile. It contains nothing personal, and removing it shifts the colours in some software, so it is kept by default.
Do social platforms strip this for you
Some do, some do not, the policies change, and different features of one platform can differ — a public post may be stripped while an original file sent through a chat is not. Rather than memorise a list that goes stale, here is a check that never expires:
- Upload a photo that has GPS in it to the platform.
- Download it back from that platform.
- Run the downloaded file through this tool and see what survived.
The safer habit is not to depend on the platform at all: clean the file before it goes out, and you know what you sent.
Does the photo you load leave the browser
No, and that matters more here than anywhere else on this site — being asked to hand a photo to a stranger in order to check whether it gives away your address is a contradiction. The file is read into this tab’s memory with the browser File API, and parsing, cleaning and building the new file all happen locally. No request carries the photo or the coordinates anywhere. To confirm it yourself, press F12, open the network tab in developer tools and drop a photo in — nothing goes out. See the privacy policy for the details.
Frequently asked questions
- Does cleaning reduce the image quality?
- No — not by a single bit. This tool never decodes or re-compresses. It walks the JPEG segment structure and rebuilds a file without the metadata segments, copying the compressed pixel data across untouched. Most online tools draw the image to a canvas and export it again, which re-compresses everything and costs a little quality every time.
- Why is there no map in the results?
- Because embedding one would send the coordinates to a mapping service, which is precisely what this tool exists to avoid. Copy them and paste them somewhere you trust instead. That is a deliberate trade-off, not a missing feature.
- Will the photo end up sideways after the EXIF is removed?
- No. Many phones store photos rotated and use an orientation tag to tell software how to turn them upright. Naively deleting the whole EXIF block causes exactly that problem, so this tool treats orientation as a display instruction rather than metadata and always keeps it.
- Do social platforms not strip this anyway?
- Some do, some do not, policies change, and different features of the same platform can behave differently. Rather than memorise a list that goes stale, verify it yourself: upload a photo, download it back from that platform, and run it through here to see what survived. That method never goes out of date.
- Does it support HEIC from an iPhone?
- No. Browsers have no built-in HEIC decoder, and supporting it would mean loading a large decoding library, which conflicts with how this site is built. An iPhone can be set to capture in the most compatible format, or you can convert to JPEG before bringing the file here.