Remove EXIF Data

Every photograph your phone or camera takes carries a block of data called EXIF, tucked into the file alongside the pixels. It records the camera make and model, the exposure settings, the exact date and time, often the lens and body serial numbers, and — if location services were on — the latitude and longitude to about a metre.

The GPS field is the one that matters. A photo of your living room posted to a forum can carry the coordinates of your home. A picture of an item for sale tells the buyer where you live before they have said a word. The serial number field is subtler but real: it links every photo you have ever published to the same physical camera.

The tool parses the EXIF block directly from the file bytes — no library, no upload — and shows you every field it finds, marking the ones that identify you or your equipment. Reading it is often the whole point; most people have never seen what their photos say.

Stripping works by redrawing the image through a canvas. A canvas holds pixels and nothing else, so re-encoding from it produces a file with no metadata block at all. The picture is identical; the data behind it is gone.

You are selling a bicycle and about to post IMG_8842.jpg, taken in your front garden, to a classifieds site.

Drop it in. Nine fields come back, and a red warning at the top: This photo records where it was taken: 31.95412, 35.91060. Those coordinates are your house. Anyone who downloads the photo can paste them into a map.

Below that: Camera make and model naming your phone, Date taken showing last Tuesday at 4:12pm, Software giving your OS version, and Orientation — the only one that is not about you.

Press Strip metadata and download. You get IMG_8842-clean.jpg, visually identical, with no EXIF block whatsoever. Drop the clean copy back into the tool to confirm: it reports no EXIF data found.

Two honest caveats. First, many platforms already strip EXIF when you upload — but not all, and not for files sent by email or messaging apps that preserve originals. Second, this removes the metadata, not information visible in the picture itself: a house number in shot is still a house number. If you also want to hide part of the frame, cropping genuinely removes those pixels.