What your photos say about you
Every photo taken with a phone or a camera carries a hidden block of information called EXIF. It usually includes the exact GPS position where the picture was taken (accurate to a few meters on a phone), the date and time, the camera or phone model, the lens, the exposure settings and the editing software. Some files also have XMP and IPTC blocks with an author name, a copyright line, keywords or a full editing history.
That is useful in your own photo library, but risky when you post a picture of your home, your children’s school or a sold item on a marketplace: anyone who downloads the original file can read the location with a free viewer. Before removing anything, this tool shows you, for every file, what it found — GPS coordinates, camera, date taken and the total number of tags. To read every single tag, open the photo in the EXIF Viewer. Our guide on how to remove EXIF data from photos covers the subject in more depth.
How the metadata is removed
Most “remove EXIF” tools simply re-encode the image, which drops the metadata but also re-compresses a JPG and loses a bit of quality each time. This one edits the file structure instead:
| Format | What is removed | Image data |
|---|---|---|
| JPG | EXIF and XMP (APP1), IPTC/Photoshop (APP13), comments, other APP blocks, extra images appended after the main one (depth maps, HDR gain maps) | copied unchanged |
| PNG | eXIf chunk, text chunks (tEXt, iTXt, zTXt — including XMP), last-modified time | copied unchanged |
| WebP | EXIF and XMP chunks | copied unchanged |
| HEIC | everything — the photo is saved as a JPG built from its pixels | re-encoded |
The parts an image needs to display correctly are kept: the JFIF header, the ICC color profile and Adobe color information for JPG, and the color and resolution chunks for PNG. Colors therefore look the same as before.
One exception: when a photo has an EXIF rotation flag (common with phone pictures held upright), deleting the flag would make it appear sideways. In that case the rotation is applied to the pixels and the photo is re-saved in its format at 95% quality (a WebP becomes a lossless PNG in browsers that can’t save WebP, such as Safari), so it still looks the right way up. The report on each card tells you which method was used.
Formats and limits
You can open JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC/HEIF files. There is no file size or count limit set by us; very large batches simply take longer, since each file is read in memory on your device. The clean file keeps its format (except HEIC, which becomes JPG) and gets “-no-metadata” added to its name, so the original is not overwritten.
If you want a smaller file at the same time, run the clean copy through Compress Image. Note that any tool that re-encodes through the browser’s canvas — compression, resizing, format conversion like HEIC to JPG — also drops EXIF, but it changes the pixels; this page is the one to use when the image must stay exactly as it is.
Privacy beyond metadata
Removing EXIF hides where and when a photo was taken, not what it shows. Street signs, house numbers, car plates, faces and screens can reveal just as much. For those, use Blur Face to hide faces automatically, then clean the result here if needed. Everything on this site runs in your browser: your photos are never uploaded, and no tracking cookies are set.