Remove EXIF Data

Why your photo knows where you live

Every photo a phone takes carries a block of data alongside the picture: the date and time, the camera and the lens, the exposure settings — and, unless you turned it off, the GPS coordinates of the spot you were standing on. That block travels with the file. Send the photo to someone and it goes too; attach it to a listing and it goes too.

The large social networks strip it during upload, which is why the problem feels theoretical right up until it isn't. Marketplace listings, forum attachments, shared drive links and plain email attachments generally strip nothing at all. The ordinary case is a second-hand listing photographed at home: the picture shows a chair, and the file underneath it names the address.

Nothing happens to the picture itself

There are two ways to strip metadata. The easy one is to open the image and save it again — the metadata disappears as a side effect. It also re-compresses the photo, usually makes an already-optimised PNG bigger, and drops the colour profile on the way out, which visibly shifts the colours of anything shot in a wide gamut.

This tool does the other thing. It walks the file's own structure, skips the sections that hold metadata, and copies everything else across unchanged. The compressed pixel data is never decoded, let alone written again, so the picture that comes out is byte for byte the picture that went in. The file gets smaller. That is the only difference.

An iPhone photo often contains a second photo

Portrait mode and several other capture modes write a multi-picture file: the photo you see, and then a second complete image appended after the end of the first — carrying its own copy of the location and the shot date.

A cleaner that only tidies the front of the file leaves that second photo sitting there, coordinates and all, inside a file it has just called clean. This one removes everything past the end of the primary image, which is why the saving on those files runs to a hundred kilobytes or more instead of the usual few.

How to remove EXIF data

1. Drop your photos onto the box above, or click it to browse.
2. Cleaning starts straight away — there is nothing to configure.
3. Read the line under each result to see what the file had been carrying, then download it.

Usable on a work computer

Plenty of workplaces block file uploads to outside websites, to keep contracts and customer records from leaving the building. On those machines the usual online converters simply fail.

This one has no upload to block. Whether your organisation permits a particular site is still its own call, so check with your IT team if you handle regulated material.

Why this is built this way

Files that pass through someone else's server can be logged, cached, retained after the promised deletion window, or exposed in a breach. Contracts, ID scans, medical records and private photos are exactly the files people most often have to convert, and exactly the ones that should not be handed to a stranger's machine.

It is also why there is no file size limit, no daily quota, and no account. Those restrictions exist to control server costs. With no server in the loop, there is nothing to ration.

Questions about removing EXIF

Are my images uploaded anywhere?

No. The picture is decoded and re-encoded by your own browser, and no request leaves the page while it works. You can confirm it: open the browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and process a file — the only requests are for this page's own script files, and none of them carry your image.

Does the photo lose any quality?

None. The compressed pixel data is copied across without being decoded, so the picture in the cleaned file is byte for byte the picture in the original. This is the difference between this page and a compressor: a compressor re-encodes and always costs something, however little. Here the only bytes that leave are the metadata ones.

Will my portrait photos end up sideways?

No. A photo taken in portrait is stored on its side and stands up only because of a rotation tag in the metadata, so removing the whole block would lay it down. That single tag is kept — rebuilt from scratch rather than carved out of the original block, because the original is where the GPS coordinates live. Nothing else in it survives.

How do I know it actually worked?

The line under each result names what the file was carrying: location, camera information, edit history. Cross-check it if you like — on a Mac, open the file in Preview and press Command-I; on Windows, right-click, choose Properties and open the Details tab. What the page reported and what those panels show should agree.

What if I want to keep the shot date?

Then this is the wrong tool, and the right one is on the same site: the HEIC to JPG converter carries the shot date, camera model and location across on purpose — that is what it is for. Use this page when you want that block gone, and that one when you want it kept.

Which files can I clean here?

JPG, PNG and WebP. iPhone HEIC files are not accepted, because there is no way to write a HEIC back out again in a browser — the file would come back converted to something else, which is a different operation from the one you asked for. Convert it with the HEIC to JPG tool first if you need to.