remove metadata from photos
See the camera, the date and the coordinates hidden in a photo, then remove them without touching a single pixel.
There is no Google Drive or Dropbox button on purpose: those send the file through a server. Here is what happens instead.
in three steps
- Drop a photo in. The tool reads it and lists what it carries: the camera, the date, and the coordinates if they are there.
- Look at what it found. Nothing is removed until you say so, and the colour profile is kept unless you ask.
- Remove it, and take the file. The picture is copied through untouched, so nothing is re-compressed.
how it works
Drop a photo in and the tool reads its metadata and lists it: the camera, the date, the exposure, and the coordinates when they are there. Nothing is removed until you say so, because the point of showing it first is that "metadata" means very little until you see your own phone model and the location of your own home written into a holiday snap.
Removing it edits the container rather than the picture. A JPEG is a chain of marked sections followed by the compressed image data; the metadata lives in its own sections, so those are dropped and everything else is copied through unchanged. A PNG works the same way with chunks. The file that comes out is pixel-for-pixel the file that went in.
why doing this locally matters here
Every other tool on this site would still be useful if it ran on a server. This one would be self-defeating. The reason to strip a photo's location is that you do not want strangers to have it — and uploading it to a website to have the location removed hands the original, location and all, to a stranger.
That is not a hypothetical objection: the file arrives complete, it sits in a queue, it is written to disk, and it is covered by whatever retention policy that service keeps. Here the only copy is the one on your machine, and the job log tells you how many requests the page made while it worked.
questions
Where does my photo go?
Nowhere. The file is read into this tab, the metadata sections are removed from it and the result is handed back to you. Nothing is uploaded — which matters more here than on any other tool on this site, because a photo you want stripped of its location is exactly the photo you should not be sending to a stranger to have it stripped.
Does removing the metadata reduce the quality?
No, and that is the difference between this and most tools that offer the same thing. The common approach is to open the image and save it again, which removes the metadata as a side effect and re-compresses the picture, losing a little quality every time. This tool edits the file container instead: the compressed image data is copied through byte for byte, so the result is identical to the original.
What is actually in my photo?
Usually the make and model of the camera or phone, the date and time down to the second, the exposure settings, the orientation, and — if location was switched on — the coordinates where it was taken, accurate to a few metres. Photos that have been edited often also carry the software name and an editing history. Drop a file in and the tool lists what it finds before you remove anything.
Why is the colour profile left alone?
A colour profile is metadata by format but not by effect: it tells software how to interpret the colours, and removing it can make an image look washed out or oversaturated on some screens. It is listed but kept unless you tick the box, because a "cleaner" that silently changes how your photo looks is doing something you did not ask for.
Do social networks not strip this anyway?
Most large platforms do strip EXIF on upload, but that is after they have received the original — including the coordinates. It also does nothing for a photo you email, send in a chat that preserves the file, upload to a forum, or attach to a form. Stripping before it leaves your machine is the only version that protects you from the first recipient.
Is this really free?
Yes. No account, no limit on how many files, no watermark. Advertising pays for the hosting, and since the photo never reaches us there is nothing about it to sell.