Remove Image Metadata & EXIF Data

How to remove metadata

1. Select your photo. Everything embedded in it is listed immediately.
2. Review it — GPS coordinates are highlighted, because they are the field people are most often surprised by.
3. Press Remove Metadata.
4. Download the clean file.

What is actually in your photos

Every photo your phone takes carries an EXIF block. A typical one contains:

• GPS latitude, longitude and altitude — often accurate to a few metres. This is the field that matters.
• Date and time of capture, to the second.
• Camera make, model and serial number. The serial number links every photo you have ever taken with that device.
• Lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length.
• Software used to edit it, and sometimes an edit history.
• Orientation, which is how the picture knows which way is up.
• Occasionally owner name or copyright fields set in the camera.

A photo of your living room, posted publicly, can contain the exact coordinates of your home. That is not hypothetical — it is the default behaviour of most phones, and it has repeatedly been used to locate people who did not intend to be found.

Orientation is handled correctly

There is a trap in metadata removal that many tools fall into. If a photo was taken sideways, the pixels are stored sideways and an orientation tag tells the viewer to rotate them. Delete the tag without acting on it and the photo appears rotated 90°.

Here, the orientation is read first and applied to the pixels, and only then is the metadata removed. Your photo comes out clean and the right way up.

Lossless where possible

Two paths, chosen automatically:

• Lossless strip. If the image needs no rotation, the metadata segments are cut out of the file directly — APP1 (EXIF and XMP), APP13 (IPTC) and comment markers for JPEG; ancillary text and eXIf chunks for PNG. The compressed image data is untouched, so the picture is bit-for-bit identical.
• Re-encode. If the orientation must be baked in, the image is decoded, rotated and re-encoded at high quality. Metadata cannot survive that process, which is exactly what we want.

The result panel tells you which path was taken.

Who should care about this

• Anyone selling online. Marketplace photos taken at home carry your address in the coordinates.
• Journalists and their sources, where a location can identify a person.
• People sharing photos of children — school, home and routine locations are all inferable from a handful of geotagged images.
• Anyone posting from a place they would rather not disclose.

Some social platforms strip EXIF on upload; many do not, and email, messaging apps in file mode, and cloud links generally pass the original through untouched. Never rely on the platform.