Remove photo metadata
Photos carry invisible data: where they were taken (GPS), when, and with which phone. This tool wipes it all before you share.
JPG, PNG or WebP
What is EXIF metadata?
Every photo taken with a smartphone or camera hides extra information inside the file: the GPS coordinates of where it was shot, the date and time, the device model, and the camera settings. Share the original file, and you share all of that too, enough for a stranger to figure out where you live or work.
How the cleaning works
A photo is made of blocks, and the tool reads them one by one: those carrying data (EXIF with the GPS, XMP, IPTC, comments, the texts and dates in PNGs) are removed, all the others are copied byte for byte. That is why the pixels stay identical to the original's: nothing is recompressed, and the file only weighs a little less than before.
Two things are kept on purpose: the colour profile, without which photos from recent phones come out with dull colours, and the orientation of the photo, without which a shot taken upright would appear on its side. The orientation is rewritten on its own, in a block that contains nothing else.
What is inside a photo, besides the photo
The GPS coordinates are the most sensitive item: they say to within metres where the shot was taken, so where you live, where you work, where your child goes to school. Then there is the exact date and time, the phone model and in some cases its serial number, the shooting settings, and on edited images also the name of the software used and sometimes that of the author.
On some cameras and phones there are less known items: an embedded thumbnail that may still be the one from before the retouching, showing the original image; and the orientation data, which explains why a photo appears upright in one program and lying on its side in another.
Who sees this data, and when
Social networks nearly always strip photos on upload, and that creates a false sense of safety. Metadata survives instead where nobody looks: in emails, in messages sent as a «file» rather than as an image, in classified ads, in photos attached to a review or a form, and in any image uploaded to a site that does not reprocess it.
The classic case is the second-hand ad: the photo taken in the living room carries the coordinates of the house, and anyone who downloads the image can read them in two clicks. It is also how a good many locations that were meant to stay private have been discovered.
Why the photo is not redrawn here
The most common way to remove metadata is to redraw the pixels into a new file, which is born without any accessory information. It works, but it has a cost: a JPG is recompressed and loses a shade of quality, the wider colours of recent phones get squashed, and the size changes.
Here, instead, only what has to go is removed, and the rest of the file stays as it was. If a file cannot be read block by block, because it is damaged or written in an unusual way, the tool falls back on redrawing and tells you, instead of handing you a half-cleaned copy. For the archive original the usual rule still applies: keep an untouched copy and clean only the one that goes out.
What removing metadata does not do
It does not make a photo anonymous. Everything visible remains: the view from the window, the number plate, the house number, a reflection in a mirror, the school shirt. Those identify a place or a person more than any coordinate, and no metadata cleaning touches them.
And it does not remove data added afterwards: if the same image is re-uploaded by a service that adds its own, or if the file is renamed with something identifiable, you start again. The file name, after all, is the most read metadata of all and the one nobody thinks about.
Nearby tools
To see what a photo contains before cleaning it there is Photo EXIF data. To make it lighter there are Compress image and Compress to a target size, to change its dimensions Resize photo, and to cover a face or a detail Cover data in a screenshot.