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EXIF viewer & remover

See exactly what a photo is telling people about you, including where it was taken. Then remove it.

  • 0 uploads
  • No limits
  • No signup
  • Works offline

What a photo knows about you

Take a photo on a phone with location services on, and the file records the latitude and longitude to roughly five decimal places. That is precise to about a metre.

Post it to a forum, attach it to a marketplace listing, or send it to someone who forwards it, and that coordinate travels with it. Anyone who opens the file’s properties can put your house on a map.

The date and time are similarly exact. The camera and lens identify your device. On some cameras there is a serial number, and on some phones the device name you chose — which is frequently your first name.

None of this is a conspiracy; it is a photography feature that predates the internet by decades and became a privacy problem when cameras got radios.

When it matters

  • Selling something online. A photo of a bicycle in your hallway, with coordinates.
  • Posting anonymously. The account is anonymous; the file is not.
  • Sending a document photo. A scan of a passport photographed at home carries your home.
  • Reporting or whistleblowing. Here it can matter a great deal.
  • Job applications. A headshot with the timestamp showing you took it during work hours.

How the removal works

There is no way to partially edit a file’s metadata without a format-specific writer, so this tool does something simpler and more thorough: it decodes the image to raw pixels and encodes a brand new file from them. A newly-created JPEG has no metadata because nothing wrote any.

The one thing that has to survive is orientation, because it lives in EXIF. The decoder applies the rotation to the pixels themselves, so the output is upright with no tag required.

Your original files are never modified. You get new ones.

Reading it elsewhere

If you want to check that a file really is clean afterwards, you do not have to take our word for it. On macOS, open the file in Preview and choose Tools → Show Inspector. On Windows, right-click → Properties → Details. On Linux, exiftool prints everything there is. A stripped file shows dimensions and colour space and essentially nothing else.

The tools that also strip it

Any operation here that re-encodes an image drops metadata by the same mechanism — compressing, resizing, converting and cropping all produce clean files by default. This page exists for when removing the metadata is the whole point, and for when you want to see what was there first.

How it works

  1. 01Add photosJPG, PNG, HEIC and TIFF are all read. Drop several at once.
  2. 02Read what is thereCamera, lens, date, exposure settings and — when present — GPS coordinates with a map link.
  3. 03Strip itOne button re-encodes each photo from raw pixels, which leaves no metadata behind.
  4. 04Download the clean copiesYour originals are untouched; you get new files.

Questions people actually ask

What is EXIF, exactly?
Exchangeable Image File Format — a block of structured data cameras write into the file alongside the pixels. It records the camera and lens, the exposure settings, the exact date and time, the orientation, sometimes the device name and owner, and on a phone, usually the GPS coordinates of where you were standing.
Do social networks already remove it?
The big ones mostly do strip EXIF on upload — but they read it first, and their servers keep what they read. And "mostly" is doing real work in that sentence: forums, marketplaces, messaging apps that send files rather than photos, dating apps, and any site that hosts the original file often pass it straight through.
Does removing EXIF change the picture?
The pixels are re-encoded once, at quality 95 for JPEG, which is visually indistinguishable. PNG sources come out lossless. The visible image is the same; only the metadata is gone.
Will the photo still be the right way up?
Yes. Orientation is stored in EXIF, so stripping it naively can leave a photo rotated. This tool applies the orientation to the actual pixels before re-encoding, so the image is upright with no tag needed.
Can I remove only the location and keep the camera data?
Not in this release — it is all or nothing. Selective field removal is planned. In the meantime, if you need camera data preserved for a photography portfolio, keep the original privately and publish the stripped copy.
Is my photo uploaded to read the metadata?
No. Parsing happens in this tab with exifr, and the GPS map link is generated locally as a plain OpenStreetMap URL — following it is your choice, and only then does anything leave your browser.

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