EXIF Privacy Remover

See what a photo reveals - GPS coordinates, device, timestamps - and strip it out in your browser, keeping the image itself untouched.

Runs locally

Everything happens in your browser. What you paste or drop here is never uploaded, logged or stored.

Drop photographs

Up to 10 at a time, 64 MB each. Processed in your browser.

Output format

JPEG quality

The GPS tag is the one that matters

A photograph taken on a phone usually carries the coordinates of where it was taken, accurate to a few metres. On a picture taken at home, that is a home address. It travels with the file into every chat, forum post, marketplace listing and support ticket it is attached to, and none of those show it to the person posting.

Alongside it sits the camera make and model, the serial number on some bodies and lenses, the software used to edit it, the exact timestamp, and sometimes the owner's name. Any of those can link photographs posted under different identities to the same camera.

Why this re-encodes instead of editing the metadata out

Removing EXIF in place means writing a JPEG parser that handles every vendor's maker notes, XMP packets, IPTC blocks, ICC profiles and embedded thumbnails - and a parser that misses one leaves data in a file its owner believes is clean. The embedded thumbnail is a particularly good example: it is a complete second copy of the image, and there are well-documented cases of a cropped photograph whose thumbnail still showed the part that was cropped out.

Drawing the pixels to a canvas and encoding them afresh sidesteps all of it. The output contains image data and nothing else, because nothing else survives the trip. What was in the original is listed first, so you can see what was removed.

The cost, stated plainly

The image is re-compressed. The output is not bit-identical to the original and there is a small quality loss at JPEG. Keep the original if that matters to you, or choose PNG for a lossless result at a considerably larger file size.

One other consequence: the orientation tag is applied rather than preserved, so an image that relied on it to display the right way up is written out already rotated. That is usually what you want, and it is worth knowing.

What this does not remove

Anything visible in the picture. A street sign, a reflection, a screen, a name badge, a distinctive view from a window - all of that is pixels, and pixels are exactly what is preserved. Metadata stripping is the easy half of photograph privacy; looking at the image is the other half and no tool does it for you.

Processed in your browser

The photographs are decoded and re-encoded locally. Nothing is uploaded, which is the only sensible arrangement for a tool whose entire purpose is removing information you do not want other people to have.

Frequently asked questions

Do social networks not strip this already?

Most large platforms do strip EXIF on upload. Plenty of places do not - forums, marketplaces, file shares, email attachments, support tickets and anything that hands the file on unchanged. The safe assumption is that the file keeps whatever it arrived with.

Can I check what is in a photo without stripping it?

The metadata found is listed before you download anything, so you can look and simply not save the result.

Why is my PNG output so much bigger?

PNG is lossless, so a photograph re-encoded as PNG is often several times the size of the JPEG. It is the right choice when quality loss matters and the wrong one for sharing.

Does this remove the embedded thumbnail?

Yes. Re-encoding produces a file containing only the pixels that were drawn, so thumbnails, maker notes and XMP all go regardless of whether this page could parse them.

Are my photos uploaded?

No. Decoding and re-encoding both happen in the browser.

References

Related tools

What this tool can and cannot tell you. It reports what is present in the input you provide. It cannot see anything you did not give it, and a clean result means nothing was found in that input - not that the wider system is secure.

Security guidance here follows current published sources - OWASP, MDN, the relevant RFCs, NIST, CISA, FIRST and MITRE - which are linked beside the specific claims they support.