EXIF Viewer & Metadata Remover

What EXIF is, and why it can leak your location

When a phone or camera saves a JPEG, it tucks a block of hidden data called EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) into the file's header, alongside the visible pixels. That block records how the shot was taken — camera make and model, lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length and the exact date and time — and, on almost every smartphone, the GPS latitude and longitude where you were standing, accurate to a few metres.

That last part is the privacy problem. A holiday snap is harmless; a photo taken at home, in a child's bedroom, or outside your workplace quietly carries the coordinates of that place. Share the file unedited and anyone who downloads it can read the location straight out of the header — no hacking required, just a free viewer or this page. Some big platforms strip metadata when you upload, but many forums, marketplaces and personal sites do not, and files sent by email, chat or AirDrop almost always keep it intact. For a deeper walkthrough of what each field records and where the block lives in the file, see the guide EXIF & Image Metadata Explained.

Cleaning a whole folder in one go

Stripping metadata is rarely a one-photo job. It is the twenty holiday pictures you are about to post, or the six listing photos shot in your own driveway. So choose or drag in as many images as you like and each one gets its own row: the file name, the size before and after, the pixel dimensions of the cleaned copy, how many metadata fields were found, its own Download button, and a red 📍 GPS location removed badge on exactly the photos that were carrying coordinates. Once two or more have finished, a Download all (.zip) button appears and packs every cleaned copy into one archive. The entry names match the per-row buttons exactly, and two photos that arrive with the same filename are numbered apart — beach-cleaned.jpg and beach-cleaned-2.jpg — instead of one silently overwriting the other. Drop a single photo and nothing changes: you still get the full readout above, because that detail is the whole point when there is only one file to look at.

Each row ends on its own terms, and one of those endings is not a failure. A picture that never carried EXIF — a screenshot, an export from an editor that already drops it, anything saved from a service that strips on upload — says "No EXIF metadata found — nothing to strip" and still hands you the re-encoded copy. A file the browser cannot decode (HEIC/HEIF from a newer iPhone, or something damaged) fails on its own row with the reason printed, does not stop the rows behind it, and is deliberately left out of the archive: a batch that quietly loses a file is worse than one that tells you which file it lost.

The honest limits. Every photo is decoded, re-drawn and re-encoded inside this one browser tab, and the archive is assembled in memory with no streaming — four or five photos are instant, but forty multi-megapixel images cost real seconds and real memory, and a tab that runs out of it will fail rather than degrade. If it struggles, work in groups of ten. The zip also uses no compression (the store method) on purpose: JPEG and PNG payloads are already compressed, so deflating them a second time typically saves one or two percent at best and can add bytes, while costing noticeable time on a large batch.

How this tool cleans a photo

Removing metadata here does not try to surgically edit the header. Instead it re-draws the picture onto an HTML canvas and re-encodes it. A canvas holds nothing but raw pixels, so when the browser saves it back out to a file there is simply nowhere for the old EXIF, IPTC or XMP data — or the embedded colour profile — to go. The result is an image that looks the same but carries none of the original's hidden fields. It is a deliberately blunt approach, and that bluntness is what makes the outcome easy to trust.

Verify the copy is really clean

You do not have to take it on faith. Download the cleaned image, then drag that new file back into this tool. If the panel reports "No EXIF metadata found" and shows no GPS row, the strip worked. Because the cleaned file went through a canvas, it cannot contain a carried-over metadata block, so this round-trip check will pass every time — and you can use the same trick to audit files cleaned by any other tool.

The JPEG re-encode caveat (honest limits)

Stripping metadata means re-saving the image, and JPEG is lossy: the cleaned copy is re-compressed, so it is not a byte-for-byte twin of the original. This tool re-encodes JPEGs at quality 0.92, which keeps the visual loss negligible for a single pass, but re-cleaning an already-cleaned JPEG repeatedly will slowly soften it. PNG re-encoding is lossless, so PNG pixels are preserved exactly. If you specifically need the original JPEG bytes with only the header rewritten — for archival or forensic reasons — use a dedicated metadata editor that edits in place rather than re-encoding. The trade-off this tool makes is a guaranteed-clean result over bit-exact preservation. One more nicety: it reads the EXIF orientation flag and bakes the rotation into the pixels, so a sideways-shot photo stays upright after cleaning even though the orientation tag is gone.

What is read and what is removed

Format support

JPEG is the primary target because it is where cameras and phones store EXIF and GPS data, and the reader is built around the JPEG APP1/EXIF layout. PNG and WebP can be cleaned too — they are re-encoded through the same canvas — but they rarely carry EXIF to begin with. HEIC/HEIF files from newer iPhones cannot be decoded by most browsers; convert one to JPEG first if the reader shows nothing. And remember that a screenshot of a photo, or a photo already posted to a service that strips metadata, will usually have no EXIF left to find.