EXIF Viewer & Remover

Read what your camera wrote into the file — including where you were standing — and delete it before you share it.

Drop photos here

JPEG, PNG or WebP — batch supported

Parsed and rewritten in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

What is hiding inside your photo

When your camera or phone saves a JPEG, it does not save pixels alone. It writes a block of structured metadata into the file describing how the photo was taken. That block is called EXIF, and most people never look at it.

Where it lives and what it holds

EXIF is stored in a JPEG's APP1 marker segment, and internally it uses the same tag structure as TIFF — which is why parsers talk about IFDs (image file directories). A typical modern photo carries:

Camera and lens. Make, model, lens identifier, serial numbers on some bodies.
Exposure data. Aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, exposure bias, metering mode, flash fired or not.
Timestamps. When the shutter opened, usually to the second, sometimes with sub-second precision and a separate timestamp for file modification.
Orientation. The single most practically useful tag — it tells viewers which way up to display the pixels.
A thumbnail. Most JPEGs embed a small preview image of their own, which is why a "cleared" file sometimes still surprises people.
GPS coordinates. Latitude, longitude, altitude, and often the direction of travel.

Why the GPS line is the one to care about

Everything else is trivia. Coordinates are not. A photo taken at home, geotagged, and posted publicly tells a stranger where you live — not approximately, but to within metres, with enough precision to identify a specific building in most cases.

The risk is not theoretical and it does not require anyone to be targeting you. Geotagged images get aggregated, scraped and indexed. Real cases have ranged from journalists inadvertently revealing sources' locations to people inadvertently publishing the whereabouts of expensive equipment or of children.

Do platforms strip it?

Most major social networks re-compress uploads and drop metadata as a side effect, and several now strip it deliberately. But this is a per-platform implementation detail that has changed over time and varies by upload path. Two things follow:

First, do not rely on it. A platform that strips metadata today may add an "original quality" upload option tomorrow — and original-quality uploads are exactly the ones that preserve metadata.

Second, files sent directly are a different story. Send a photo through a messaging app using its "send as file" or "original" option and you are sending the whole file, metadata included. The receiving party can read it with any of a dozen free tools.

What "removing" actually means

There is a meaningful difference between hiding metadata in an export dialogue and rewriting the file so the data is gone. This tool re-encodes the image through a canvas: the pixels are decoded, the metadata is not carried across, and a fresh file is written. The output contains no EXIF block because none was ever written to it.

Two caveats worth knowing. Re-encoding a JPEG means re-compressing it — use a high quality setting and accept that this is a lossy round trip, or export to PNG if the image must be untouched (at a large file-size cost). And stripping EXIF from a JPEG does nothing about metadata in other formats: PNG carries its own tEXt and eXIf chunks, WebP and TIFF carry theirs. Clear each file you intend to share.

Quick ways to check yourself

Screenshot a photo and the result usually has no EXIF, because a screenshot is a new capture, not a copy of the original file — which is why screenshots are the standard low-effort way to send someone a "clean" image. For anything you care about, though, check rather than assume: load the file here before you share it, and look specifically at whether a GPS section appears.

Frequently asked questions

Will stripping EXIF reduce image quality?

Stripping itself does not, but the method used here — decoding the pixels and re-encoding — is a lossy round trip for JPEG. Use a high quality setting and the difference is imperceptible for most purposes. If the file must be bit-perfect, remove the metadata with a tool that rewrites only the APP1 segment rather than re-encoding.

Can I remove just the GPS and keep the camera settings?

Editing individual tags while leaving the rest intact requires writing a new EXIF block, which this tool does not do — it either reads everything or produces a file with nothing. If you want to keep exposure data for your own records, keep the original and share the stripped copy.

Do PNG files have EXIF too?

PNG uses a different chunk structure, but yes — it can carry tEXt, zTXt and a modern eXIf chunk, and those can include GPS data. Clearing a JPEG's metadata says nothing about a PNG exported from it, so clear whatever format you are actually sharing.

Why does my photo appear rotated after I strip metadata?

Because the orientation was stored in a tag rather than baked into the pixel order. Once that tag is gone, viewers fall back to the raw pixel layout. Re-encode with the orientation applied to the pixels — which this tool does — and the image keeps looking correct everywhere.

Is reading EXIF from someone else's photo legal?

Reading metadata from a file you already have is generally a matter of curiosity, not law — but what you do with the result is not. Using location data to identify or track a person without their knowledge raises obvious privacy and, in some jurisdictions, legal issues. Use this on your own photos.