Remove Metadata from Photos

What metadata hides inside a photo?

Every photo from a phone or camera carries a hidden block of EXIF metadata written at capture time. The risky ones:

• GPS coordinates. Precision down to a few meters — enough to place a photo at a specific home, school or hotel room.
• Device identity. Camera make, model, lens and even serial-number-bearing vendor blobs can identify whose device took the shot.
• Timestamps. Exactly when the photo was taken and edited.
• Editing software. Which app touched the file last.
• Embedded thumbnails. Some cameras store a smaller preview inside the file — occasionally of a frame you didn't intend to share.

None of this is visible in the picture itself, which is exactly why it keeps leaking. Marketplaces, forums and classified-ad sites usually keep the original file you attach — metadata included.

What this remover actually does

The tool reads the file structure directly: for a JPEG it walks the marker segments and drops the EXIF APP1 segment, XMP, IPTC/Photoshop data, comments and multi-picture blocks; for PNG it removes the eXIf chunk and known metadata text chunks; for WebP it deletes the EXIF/XMP chunks and clears the container flags. The compressed pixel data is copied byte-for-byte, so the output looks identical and has identical quality. In GPS-only mode the EXIF block is rebuilt without the location entries, keeping everything else intact.

If you'd rather keep some context, the choose what to keep mode lets you retain dates or shooting settings while still deleting the coordinates and device identifiers.

How it compares to phone built-ins

iPhones strip some metadata when sharing through AirDrop or Messages ("remove location" options in the share sheet), but emailing a file, uploading to cloud drives, or sending "Actual Photo" copies generally keeps EXIF intact. Android's behavior varies by vendor and app. A browser tool gives you a file that is clean before you pick the channel — one habit that works everywhere.

Supported formats and limits

• JPEG — full support, pixels untouched.
• PNG — eXIf and metadata text chunks removed, image chunks untouched.
• WebP — EXIF/XMP chunks removed, container flags cleared.
• HEIC (iPhone) — works in Safari, which can decode HEIC locally; other browsers will re-encode to JPEG or ask you to convert first. See the iPhone-specific guide.
• Process up to 20 images per batch; each browser has its own memory ceiling for very large files.

Curious what a file contains before deciding what to strip? Inspect it with the online EXIF viewer, or remove just the coordinates with the GPS removal tool.