Image
EXIF Metadata Remover
See what a photograph is carrying — where it was taken, on what camera, when, and by whom — then remove it without re-encoding the image. The pixels come out byte for byte identical; only the metadata is gone.
How to use it
- Drop a JPEG or PNG onto the page, or choose one. It is read in your browser and not uploaded.
- Read what it carries. Location and serial numbers are shown first and in colour.
- Leave the colour profile ticked unless you want the smallest file and do not mind the picture looking flatter.
- Download the clean copy. The original on your disk is untouched.
- Check it worked by dropping the cleaned file back in — it should report nothing to remove.
How it works
A JPEG is a list of segments: some hold the compressed picture, others hold EXIF, comments or the colour profile. This walks that list and copies out every byte except the metadata segments, stopping at the point the image data begins.
A PNG is a list of chunks and works the same way: tEXt, iTXt, zTXt and eXIf go, IHDR and IDAT stay.
Nothing is decoded and nothing is re-encoded, so the compressed image data is bit-identical to the original.
The EXIF reader is deliberately partial. It surfaces location, camera, lens, timestamp and serial numbers rather than dumping every tag, because a full dump buries the two lines that matter.
Everything runs in your browser. The photograph never leaves your device.
Common questions
Why not just re-save the photo to remove metadata?
Because re-saving a JPEG re-compresses it. Every tool that strips metadata by drawing the picture onto a canvas and exporting it is quietly generating a new, slightly worse image — softer detail, new compression artefacts, usually a different file size in either direction. This removes the metadata segments from the file's container and copies the compressed image data across unchanged, so the photograph that comes out is the one that went in.
Why is the colour profile kept?
Because removing it changes how the photograph looks. An ICC profile is metadata in the technical sense but carries nothing private — it tells a display how to interpret the colours, and without it most images render flatter and duller. Strippers that remove everything do this silently. It is a checkbox here, ticked, with the consequence written next to it.
Why is there no map of the GPS location?
Because drawing a map means fetching tiles from somebody's server, and this site makes no external requests at all. It would also mean sending the location of a private photograph to a third party in the middle of a tool built to remove exactly that. The coordinates are shown as numbers; paste them somewhere you trust if you want to see the spot.
Does social media not strip this already?
Most large platforms do strip EXIF on upload — but that is after your file has reached their servers, so they have the original and the location. It also does not help with a photo sent by email or a messaging app, attached to a listing, or posted anywhere smaller. Removing it before it leaves your machine is the only version that does not depend on somebody else's policy.
What about other formats?
JPEG and PNG, because those are the two where the metadata can be removed surgically. HEIC and WebP store it differently and cleaning them properly needs a different approach; converting a HEIC to JPEG here will drop most of it as a side effect, but that is a conversion rather than a clean.
HEIC to JPG →