What is EXIF Data?
Every photo from a phone or camera carries an invisible passenger: EXIF metadata. It typically includes the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, the exact date and time, the device make and model, and the camera settings. Photo apps read it to organize your library — but when you share the file, the metadata travels with it, and anyone who receives the photo can read it with free tools.
Why Remove It?
The GPS field is the headline risk: a photo taken at home and posted online can reveal your home address to within meters. Sellers on marketplace sites, people sharing photos of their kids, journalists protecting sources, and anyone posting from a location they’d rather not disclose all have the same need — share the picture, not the coordinates. (Major social networks strip EXIF on upload, but email, messaging apps in “document” mode, cloud links, and marketplaces often don’t.)
What Does This Tool Do?
Drop a photo and download a clean copy: the pixels re-encoded, all metadata gone — GPS, timestamps, device info, everything. The image is processed entirely in your browser; ironically for a privacy tool, most online EXIF removers upload your photo to their servers first. This one doesn’t — disconnect from the internet after loading the page and it still works.
The output keeps your photo’s format family (JPEG stays JPEG, PNG stays PNG) and a quality slider lets you control JPEG re-encoding — at the default 80%+, the visual difference is negligible.
How to Use This Tool
- Drop a photo (or click to browse).
- Check the before/after preview — the image looks the same; the metadata is what changed.
- Download the
-cleancopy and share that one.
What Survives and What Doesn’t
Removed: GPS coordinates, capture date/time, camera make/model, lens and exposure settings, software tags, embedded thumbnails, copyright fields. Kept: the pixels themselves and their dimensions. Note that the visual content can still identify a location — street signs, landmarks, reflections — so metadata removal is one layer of a privacy decision, not the whole of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my photo uploaded to a server?
No — the re-encoding happens in your browser via the canvas API. You can verify: load the page, enable airplane mode, and clean a photo offline.
How does re-encoding remove EXIF?
The canvas API decodes a photo to raw pixels, which have no metadata, and encodes a fresh file from them. The new file simply never had the EXIF blocks — there’s nothing to “scrub” incompletely.
Does it reduce photo quality?
PNG output is lossless. JPEG output is re-encoded at your chosen quality — at 80%+ the difference from the original is practically invisible. What you trade for certainty about metadata is one generation of JPEG encoding.
How can I check that the EXIF is really gone?
On Windows: right-click the file → Properties → Details. On macOS: open in Preview → Tools → Show Inspector → the ⓘ tab. The clean copy shows no GPS, camera, or date-taken fields.
Do WhatsApp and Instagram already strip EXIF?
Photo posts on major social networks and standard photo messages on WhatsApp are stripped and recompressed. The gaps: sending as “file/document”, email attachments, cloud storage links, and marketplace uploads — exactly the flows where an original file travels untouched.
Does rotating a sideways photo keep working without EXIF?
Yes — this tool applies the EXIF orientation to the pixels during processing, so the clean copy displays upright everywhere, even though the orientation tag itself is gone.