EXIF Metadata Remover – strip hidden data without touching the pixels
Every photo you take carries a second, invisible payload. A phone camera writes the GPS coordinates of where you stood, the exact second the shutter fired, the make, model and often the serial number of the device, and a small preview image. Editing apps add their own history, and AI image generators paste the full prompt into the file. This EXIF metadata remover shows you what a JPEG, PNG or WebP file gives away, then removes it losslessly, in your browser, without uploading anything.
EXIF, XMP and IPTC in one minute
Metadata lives in separate blocks inside the image container, next to the compressed picture rather than inside it. The main kinds are listed below. The tool walks each container block by block, so it sees all of them, including ones a basic EXIF viewer misses.
| Block | Where it lives | What it can hold |
|---|---|---|
| EXIF | JPEG APP1, PNG eXIf, WebP EXIF | GPS, capture time, camera and lens serials, exposure, embedded thumbnail, MakerNote |
| XMP | JPEG APP1, PNG iTXt, WebP XMP | Editing history, creator and contact details, keywords, named face regions, depth maps |
| IPTC / Photoshop | JPEG APP13 | Caption, keywords, by-line, copyright, city and country, Photoshop thumbnail |
| PNG text chunks | tEXt, zTXt, iTXt | Author and comments, plus AI prompts and workflows from image generators |
| Trailing data | After the JPEG end marker | Extra images, HDR gain maps and motion-photo video |
Real leaks, not theory
In December 2012 a magazine published a photo of John McAfee, then avoiding the authorities, and the image still held the GPS position of where it was taken in Guatemala. Readers pulled the coordinates out within hours. A quieter leak comes from embedded thumbnails: some older editors cropped the main image but left the original preview untouched, so the “cropped” file still contained the full, uncropped picture. The preview check above decodes every embedded preview and flags any whose shape doesn’t match the main image.
Why lossless removal matters
Many metadata strippers simply draw the image onto a canvas and save a new JPEG. That works, but it re-compresses the pixels (each pass loses detail), turns PNG and WebP files into JPEGs so transparency is lost, and drops the colour profile, which makes Display P3 phone photos look dull. This tool never decodes the picture. It cuts whole metadata blocks out of the container, or edits entries inside an EXIF block in place, and then compares a SHA-256 hash of the image data before and after. If the hashes differ, the download is disabled.
Editing EXIF in place matters too. Camera MakerNotes often contain offsets measured from the start of the EXIF block, so a tool that rebuilds EXIF from scratch can quietly corrupt them. Here, removed entries are zeroed and their slots compacted, while every kept byte stays at the same offset.
When the original file reaches other people
Many large social platforms remove most metadata when they re-compress an upload, but that behaviour varies by service and changes over time, so don’t rely on it. The full original, GPS and all, usually travels intact when you send an email attachment, share a cloud-drive link, upload to a marketplace listing, or pick a messenger’s “send as file” or “send as document” option. Those are the moments to clean a photo first.
Supported files
JPEG (including progressive, CMYK and motion photos), PNG (including APNG animation and Stable Diffusion or ComfyUI output) and WebP are supported, one at a time or in a batch with a ZIP download. HEIC and AVIF can’t be cleaned losslessly in a browser, so convert them to JPEG first. Damaged files are refused rather than half-cleaned, so you never get a file that still carries GPS.