What a photo can give away
Before you post or send a photo, it’s worth knowing what goes with it. Apple says that when Location Services is on for the Camera app, “these coordinates are embedded into each photo and video”. Exif can also record the camera’s serial numbers, the owner’s name, the date and time, the software used and a small thumbnail. This tool removes all of them.
Generated images can carry something of their own: some local AI image tools save their generation settings as text in the PNG file.
Whether any of that should leave with the photo is your call, and it can depend on who you’re sending it to. If you’d like to see what a photo carries first, read it in the viewer, then clean it here.
What this removes, EXIF included, and what it keeps
This tool removes Exif, including the GPS location stored in it, along with XMP, IPTC and Photoshop data, comments, PNG text chunks, Content Credentials, and any extra images or data stored after a JPEG’s main image. That includes copyright and creator fields; there’s no option to keep them.
Two things stay by default, because they’re display settings. Browsers treat an image without a color profile as sRGB, which is why the profile is kept unless you turn that off. Browsers rotate JPEG photos by their Exif orientation, so the orientation is kept, along with the display size, as a minimal Exif block with nothing else in it.
Either can be turned off with the options above. A color profile has a free-text name, so turning the profile off removes that too.
One kind of extra image does change how a photo displays. When a JPEG has an HDR gain map stored after the main image, the gain map is removed; the photo looks the same on standard screens and shows without the extra brightness on HDR screens.
Why nothing is recompressed
JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF keep metadata in segments, chunks or extension blocks that are separate from the compressed image data. The tool copies the compressed image data byte for byte and leaves the other metadata blocks out, apart from the display settings described above, so nothing is re-encoded.
That’s the difference from re-saving. An image drawn onto a browser canvas and saved again is a newly encoded file: the original’s metadata isn’t carried over, and neither is the original compressed data.
Nothing being re-encoded doesn’t mean nothing about the result can change. If you turn off the color profile or orientation, or the photo had an HDR gain map, it can look different.
This also removes Content Credentials
Content Credentials are a signed record of how a file was made and changed, and a cleaned copy doesn’t have them. Removing metadata also removes any other statement in it about how the image was made, such as the IPTC digital source type.
If you made the image and want that record to travel with it, keep the original and share that where it matters. This page doesn’t change your original file. To know what you’d be giving up, see what a file’s Content Credentials say before you clean it.
What removing metadata can’t remove
Removing metadata doesn’t change what the picture shows: faces, signs, landmarks and reflections stay. If a sign or a landmark in the frame shows where a photo was taken, the cleaned copy shows it just as well.
Invisible watermarks in the pixels stay too. SynthID is one: a watermark embedded in the content itself, which removing metadata doesn’t touch. The C2PA says credentials can be tied to an image through soft bindings, such as an invisible watermark or a fingerprint, which can help find them again after they’ve been removed from the file.
The file name stays the same apart from the “-no-metadata” ending, so a name with a date in it still shows that date. Your original isn’t changed, and neither is any copy already posted or sent elsewhere. Removing metadata is one step, not a disguise.
Sharing a photo without its location
On iPhone, Apple describes two ways: turning off Location in the Share sheet’s Options before you share, and setting the Camera’s Location Services access to Never so it stops adding location to new photos.
In Google Photos on the web, Google says a location your camera added automatically can’t be updated or removed. So download the photo, remove the metadata here and share the cleaned copy; the copy in Google Photos keeps its location.
For a photo still on your iPhone, Apple’s own options are there when you share. For one already in Google Photos, or copied off a camera, clean a copy and share that.
Do sites strip metadata when you upload?
In IPTC’s 2019 test, some did and some didn’t. Images saved from Twitter had their metadata stripped, while Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive passed the original file through. Not every site could be checked, because some offered no way to save an image. It’s a dated result, and cleaning a photo before you upload it means you don’t have to find out what a site does now.
Why nothing is uploaded
Uploading a photo to a server in order to remove its location would be backwards. Here the bytes are read and rewritten in this tab and never sent anywhere, and the tool’s script makes no network request. The photos stay on your device from the moment you drop them to the moment you download the copies. Turn the network off once the page has loaded and the tool keeps working.
