EXIF Viewer & Remover

Every photo a phone or camera takes is stored with a block of metadata called EXIF, sitting alongside the image inside the same file. It was designed for photographers: shutter speed, aperture, ISO, lens, orientation. Useful, and entirely benign.

Then GPS was added. Unless you have explicitly turned location off for the camera, most phones record the coordinates of where each photo was taken, to around a metre, in every single file. Alongside that sit the capture time to the second, the device make and model, and on some cameras a body serial number that links every photo you have ever taken to the same piece of hardware.

None of this is visible when you look at the picture. It travels with the file, silently, into every place you send it — and unlike the image, nobody ever checks it. Load a photo above and you will see exactly what yours contains.

Most large social platforms strip EXIF when you upload, which has convinced a lot of people the problem is solved. It is not, because the places that do not strip it are the places you send files directly to a person.

Email attachments keep it. Messaging apps that send "as a file" or "original quality" keep it. Cloud storage links keep it. Marketplace listings on smaller sites keep it. Attachments to a support ticket, an insurance claim or a rental application keep it — and those go to strangers by definition.

The classic failure is selling something online. You photograph the item on your kitchen table, upload it to a listing site that does not strip metadata, and the advert now carries your home address to the nearest metre. The same applies to photographs of documents, of children, and of anything you would describe as "just a picture of a thing".

There is a particular absurdity in uploading a photo to a website in order to remove the location data from it.

The file you hand over is the unstripped original — the one with your coordinates in it. Whatever the operator promises, you have just given a stranger the precise thing you were trying not to share, plus the image, plus your IP address and the time you did it. If the concern was ever real, the upload was the disclosure.

Yet almost every EXIF remover works this way, because it is the easier thing to build. And they are used overwhelmingly by people who have just realised their photos contain their home address, which is to say by exactly the people for whom the upload matters most.

Here the file is read by your browser and the clean copy is written by your browser. Nothing is transmitted. Check it as you would check any such claim: open the Network tab and load a photo, or disconnect from Wi-Fi and do it anyway. It works either way, because there is nothing at the other end.

A JPEG is a sequence of labelled segments. The image itself lives in one of them; the metadata lives in others. Removing metadata therefore does not require touching the picture at all — the segments carrying EXIF, XMP and IPTC data are dropped and everything else is copied through byte for byte.

That matters, because the obvious alternative is to redraw the image on a canvas and re-export it, which does strip metadata but also re-compresses every pixel. You would lose a generation of quality to delete a few kilobytes of text. Here the compressed image data in your clean copy is bit-identical to the original.

The colour profile is deliberately kept. It says nothing about you, and removing it would visibly shift the colours on a wide-gamut photo. The orientation flag is part of the EXIF block and does go — if a stripped photo appears rotated in some older viewer, that is why, and modern viewers and browsers handle it correctly.

Your original file is never modified; the clean copy downloads as a separate file with -clean added to the name. And this reads JPEG, which is what phones and cameras produce. PNG and WebP carry little or no camera metadata, and HEIC keeps it in a different container — converting a HEIC to JPG with the converter linked below already drops it, because that conversion re-encodes from decoded pixels.