EXIF remover for photos and screenshots
See every field your photo carries, then take it out without touching a single pixel. Runs in your browser — no upload, no account.
Runs in your browser 0 bytes uploadedDrop a photo or screenshot here
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Read on this machine and rewritten on this machine. There is no server in this transaction.
Remove EXIF data from photos without posting them somewhere first
A photograph taken on a phone in the last decade almost certainly knows where it was taken. Latitude and longitude sit in the file at six decimal places, which narrows the spot to about the width of a dinner plate, along with the altitude and the second the shutter opened. That is the field people want gone before a picture goes up for sale, onto a forum, into a dating profile or out to a stranger who answered an advert. The customary way to delete it is to send the whole photograph, coordinate intact, to a website run by people you will never meet. The dangerous thing arrives at its destination and is then asked to leave.
Nothing here does that, and the arrangement is easy to verify rather than merely stated. Hand a picture in and the browser fetches one small program from this domain — the code that walks the blocks inside an image file — which is byte-for-byte the same for every visitor and is not fetched at all for someone who reads this page and leaves. After it arrives the network goes quiet. Open your developer tools and watch the request list as you work; better still, hand the file in so the program loads, pull the machine off the network, and do the job anyway. Checking a tool for yourself takes a minute and the method works on any site, including this one.
What these three formats can hold
| Full name | Joint Photographic Experts Group |
|---|---|
| Extension |
.jpg, .jpeg
|
| Format type | Lossy raster image |
| MIME type |
image/jpeg
|
| Full name | Portable Network Graphics |
|---|---|
| Extension |
.png
|
| Format type | Lossless raster image, with alpha |
| MIME type |
image/png
|
| Full name | Web Picture format |
|---|---|
| Extension |
.webp
|
| Format type | Lossy or lossless raster image, with alpha |
| MIME type |
image/webp
|
Nothing is re-encoded, and the receipt proves it
There are two ways to build a tool like this, and the difference shows up in your picture rather than in the marketing. The quick way is to decode the image and save it again: a handful of lines, and everything vanishes because a fresh save writes no properties at all. It also pushes every pixel through JPEG quantization a second time, which softens edges, mottles smooth gradients and cannot be undone. Nobody tidying a photograph before publishing it has asked for a slightly worse photograph.
The other way treats the file as what it actually is — a chain of labeled blocks, some holding compressed picture data and some holding descriptions of you. Copy the first kind across untouched and simply omit the second, and the pixels are not merely similar to the original, they are the identical bytes. That is the approach here, and because it is a factual claim it is checked rather than asserted: after every run the tool compares the compressed image data in the source with the compressed image data in the result and reports the outcome on the receipt. If you want a picture that is smaller as well as anonymous, that is a separate decision made deliberately with image compression rather than a side effect of cleaning.
Two blocks are deliberately left alone in a JPEG, for the same reason: they describe the picture, not the photographer. One records pixel density, so dropping it changes how large the image prints. The other tells decoders how the color channels are arranged, and files from certain professional workflows come back with inverted colors when it goes missing. Both are named in the list with a note saying they were kept, because a tool that quietly makes exceptions is a tool you have to trust instead of read.
The preview inside the picture, and the video nobody mentions
Two things live in image files that most cleaning tools never speak about, and both are worth knowing even if you use something else entirely.
The first is the embedded preview. A camera writes a small copy of the shot into the metadata so that a viewer can show a grid of images quickly, and editing software does not always regenerate it. Crop a face out of the corner of a photo and the preview may still show that corner. It is a documented cause of real disclosures, and it is invisible unless something goes looking. This tool reads the preview's dimensions and compares its proportions with the picture's — a mismatch is the fingerprint of exactly that situation, and it is reported in plain words before you run anything.
The second is everything after the end of the file. A JPEG has a defined final marker, and a phone shooting in motion or live mode appends a complete video after it. It is frequently the largest single thing in the file and no image viewer will ever show it to you. Here it is listed with its size, and it goes when you clean the file. If your pictures come off an iPhone they are probably HEIC rather than JPEG, in which case the honest answer is a different route: converting HEIC to JPG offers a metadata option, and leaving it unticked produces a JPEG with nothing in it.
What this EXIF remover will not do for you
It will not take a watermark off a picture. A visible mark is painted into the pixels; it is part of the image, and nothing described here touches pixels. What does disappear is an invisible ownership claim held in the properties — a copyright line, a credit, a rights statement — and that cuts both ways. If the photograph is yours, cleaning it removes your own attribution along with everything else, so put the credit back in the caption where a human being will actually read it.
It will not write false information into a picture either. Tools exist that let you set a camera model, a date or a location after the fact, and there is precisely one decent use for that against several bad ones. We would rather not be the site that makes it easy to claim a photograph was taken somewhere it was not. And it will not tell you what a maker note contains: that block is the manufacturer's own undocumented format, different for every camera line, and the only honest report is its size — which is itself an argument for not publishing it. If your concern is a document rather than a photograph, the same job on the other side of the fence is stripping PDF metadata, and turning a picture into a plain web-ready file is PNG to JPG.
Questions
Does my photo get uploaded?
No, and there is no endpoint here that could accept one. What arrives over the network is a program — the code that walks the file structure — and it is identical for every visitor, served from this domain, and not fetched at all until you hand a picture in. A person who reads this page and leaves downloads none of it. That distinction is easy to check rather than take on faith: open the network panel and watch while you work. The reason it matters more here than almost anywhere is arithmetic rather than principle. The single most sensitive thing in a photograph is usually the coordinate recorded at the moment the shutter opened, and sending the file to a stranger to have that coordinate deleted hands over the coordinate first.
Does this reduce the quality of my picture?
Not by a single pixel, and that is a deliberate piece of engineering rather than a lucky outcome. The lazy way to strip metadata is to decode the image and encode it again, which does clear everything — and also puts every pixel through JPEG quantization a second time, permanently. This tool never decodes anything. It walks the file as a chain of blocks, copies the compressed image data across verbatim, and simply does not copy the blocks that describe you. The receipt reports the result of an actual byte-for-byte comparison of the image data before and after, so it is a measurement rather than a promise.
What exactly gets removed?
Everything the file lists as metadata, and the list is shown to you first with each block named and sized. In a JPEG that typically means the EXIF block (camera make and model, lens, serial numbers, exposure settings, timestamps and GPS), an XMP packet from an editor, an IPTC block if it has been through a photo desk, any free-text comment, and any extra pictures hidden inside such as an embedded preview. In a PNG it means the text chunks, the modification time, and — surprising most people — an EXIF chunk, which PNG has supported since 2017. Two JPEG blocks are deliberately kept because they describe the picture rather than the photographer: the JFIF density block and the Adobe color-transform block, whose removal makes some files print at the wrong size or decode with inverted colors.
Why is the color profile a separate choice?
Because it is the only block whose removal changes how the picture looks. An ICC profile says what the numbers in the image mean — which red is meant by this particular red — and without one, viewers assume sRGB. For a picture that was already sRGB nothing happens; for a picture in Display P3 or Adobe RGB, colors shift, and a photograph of a sunset can come back noticeably duller. It carries nothing about you, so it is kept by default and offered as a checkbox rather than swept up with the rest.
Can it handle HEIC photos from an iPhone?
It reads them enough to tell you what you are holding, but it does not rewrite them, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong kind of helpful. HEIC and AVIF store their metadata inside a nested box structure where the offsets of the image data are recorded elsewhere in the file, so removing a box means rebuilding the container rather than snipping a section out of it. Converting the photo to JPG reaches the same destination by a road that already exists here: the converter has a metadata option, and leaving it unticked produces a file with nothing in it.
How do I know it actually worked?
The receipt carries three lines and each one is a separate measurement. Line one walks the finished picture as a structured file and counts what is left, which ought to be zero. Line two ignores the structure entirely and sweeps the whole thing for the signatures a metadata block starts with, plus every value that came out of your own photo — the model name, the serial, whatever was typed into the comment. That second sweep is there to cover the first one’s honest weakness: a block our reader does not recognize gets neither taken out nor mentioned, so trusting the reader alone means trusting it about the very thing it got wrong. A blind byte search has no opinion about what a block is, and finds one anyway. Line three is the pixel comparison described above.
How big a photo can this take?
As big as you like. Nothing is turned away for its size, since the hardware is yours and the judgment about what it can survive belongs with it; what arrives instead is a short, honest sentence about the demand, said early enough to be useful. And the demand is unusually small for an image tool. Nothing here turns the picture into pixels — a forty-megapixel raw-ish JPEG never gets expanded into the hundred and sixty megabytes an editor would need for the same file — so the memory in play stays close to the file and one copy of it. The thumbnail you see on screen is drawn by the browser from the original, not by us.
Will this remove a watermark?
No, and the two are often confused in a way worth untangling. A visible watermark is painted into the pixels; it is part of the picture, and nothing described on this page touches pixels. What can be removed is an invisible claim of ownership stored in the metadata — a copyright field, an IPTC credit line, an XMP rights statement — and those do go, because they are metadata by definition. That is worth knowing in both directions: if you are the photographer, stripping metadata takes your own credit line out along with everything else.