Remove photo metadata before you post it
A phone photo carries a second file inside it that you never see: the model of the phone, the exact time, sometimes the software used to edit it, and — unless you turned it off — the latitude and longitude where it was taken, accurate to a few metres. This page shows you what is in a photo, then rewrites the file without it. The image itself is untouched. Nothing is uploaded; the files never leave your browser.
Drop photos here, or click to choose
JPEG and PNG. Several at once is fine.
What a photo file actually contains
A JPEG is not one stream of pixels. It is a stack of labelled blocks, and the picture is only the last of them. The blocks in front are metadata — and they survive almost every step people take before publishing a photo. Cropping in the phone's gallery, sending it through a messaging app that recompresses heavily, uploading it to a marketplace: any of these may keep the location block, because nothing in that chain has a reason to delete it.
| Block | What it usually holds | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
APP1 — EXIF | Camera make and model, lens, exposure, orientation, capture timestamp, serial number, and the GPS block | The GPS block is the one with real consequences. It is decimal degrees, not a city name. |
APP1 — XMP | Editing history, ratings, keywords, sometimes a full Lightroom or Photoshop record | Can reveal that a photo was edited, and by which tool. |
APP13 — IPTC | Caption, byline, copyright, contact details | Sometimes contains a name and an email address. |
APP0 — JFIF | Pixel density, thumbnail | Harmless. Kept. |
APP2 — ICC | Colour profile | Removing it changes how the colours look. Kept on purpose. |
COM | Free text a program left behind | Occasionally contains a file path or an account name. |
PNG files carry the same sort of thing in tEXt, zTXt, iTXt, eXIf and tIME blocks. This tool removes those too.
Why GPS in a listing photo is a real problem
The usual version of this warning is about social media, which is the least interesting case — those platforms mostly strip metadata on upload anyway. The case that actually costs people something is a marketplace or a classifieds listing: you photograph an item in your home, upload it, and the file you uploaded still says where your home is. Buyers download listing images all the time, and a downloaded image keeps whatever the platform did not strip.
The coordinates are not vague. Consumer phone GPS resolves to roughly 5–10 metres outdoors, which is enough to identify a specific house on a street. If the photo was taken indoors, the fix is often worse: a phone that cannot see satellites falls back to the last known location, which can be a previous address.
What this tool does, exactly
- Reads the blocks and tells you what is there. Before changing anything, each file is listed with the metadata it contains — decoded into something readable, including the GPS position as decimal degrees.
- Rewrites the container, not the image. The metadata blocks are dropped and the remaining blocks are copied through byte for byte. The compressed image data is never re-encoded, so there is no generation loss and no change in quality.
- Hands back a new file. One file downloads directly; several arrive as a single ZIP. Your original stays exactly as it was — this tool does not overwrite anything.
APP2 ICC block is a metadata block too, but it describes the colour space rather than the photographer. Strip it from a photo tagged in Display P3 and the same file will look noticeably different in a browser. Everything that identifies a person or a place is removed; what makes the colours correct is not.
What it cannot do
- HEIC and WebP are not supported yet. Both store metadata in a different container. Convert first: HEIC to JPG handles iPhone photos, and Convert Image Format covers the rest.
- It does not remove data that is part of the picture. A reflection in a mirror, a letter with an address on the table, a street sign — no metadata tool can help with those.
- It cannot clean a file you already published. If the photo is online, deleting the old copy and uploading the cleaned one is the only fix, and any copy somebody already downloaded is out of reach.
Why this one runs in your browser
Metadata removal is the one job where uploading a file to a website is self-defeating. The most popular EXIF removers are, by necessity, a place where people deliberately send photographs with their home coordinates attached. Every upload is a copy on somebody else's disk, governed by somebody else's retention policy.
This page has no server to send anything to. There is no upload endpoint, no request that carries file bytes, and no analytics call that includes them. You can confirm it: open the browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and load a photo. No request appears. Then disconnect from the network entirely and use the tool again — it still works, which is not something a server-side tool can say.
How to check the result yourself
Do not take the tool's word for it. On Windows, right-click the downloaded file, choose Properties, then the Details tab: the camera fields and the location line are either gone or blank. On macOS, open the file in Preview and press Command-I. From a terminal, exiftool yourfile.jpg prints every tag that is left — if the output is a handful of lines about colour and dimensions, the metadata is gone.
If exiftool still reports a GPS group, the file was not a JPEG or PNG and it went through unchanged — the tool says so per file rather than pretending.
Questions
Does removing metadata reduce image quality?
No. The compressed image data is copied through untouched. A 4 MB photo stays a 4 MB photo; only the metadata blocks around it disappear, so the file gets smaller by exactly the size of what was removed — usually 10 to 60 KB.
Will social platforms or marketplaces strip it for me?
Some do, some partly, some not at all, and it changes without notice. Relying on the destination to clean your file means trusting a policy you cannot see. Cleaning it before it leaves your machine does not depend on anyone's policy.
Does this break the photo on a marketplace?
No. The result is an ordinary JPEG or PNG of the same dimensions. Marketplaces read dimensions and the picture itself, not the EXIF block. Removing metadata cannot get an image rejected for size, format or background.
What about the rotation of a phone photo?
An iPhone stores a portrait photo sideways and adds an orientation tag telling the viewer which way to turn it. That tag lives in EXIF, so stripping the block removes it — and this tool deliberately does not re-encode the pixels to compensate.
In most cases you will not notice, because browsers and modern image software look at the pixels rather than the tag. When it does show up, the cleaned photo lies on its side, and the file card above warns you before you download. The fix is to rotate it once in the app you are uploading to, or open the cleaned file and save it again from any viewer, which bakes the rotation into the pixels permanently. That is a better trade than re-encoding every photo and costing quality on all of them to rescue a few.
Is there a file size or count limit?
Only your browser's memory. A few dozen photos is comfortable. There is no fixed limit because there is no server to hit one.