Remove EXIF and Metadata from Photos
We wipe GPS, camera model, capture date and the whole metadata block in a second. Processing runs on our server, your files never go to the cloud.
What EXIF actually is and why you should clear it
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a block of service data inside a JPG that the camera or phone adds when you take a shot. It can hold a lot of personal stuff:
- GPS coordinates of where the shot was taken, accurate to 5 meters
- Device model and serial number
- Exact date and time of the shot
- Author name, if it is set in the camera settings
- The software the photo was edited in
- Exposure settings, ISO, shutter speed
When you post a photo to a website, a social network or send it to someone, this data travels with it. Most social networks now strip EXIF on upload, but not all of them. Not all messengers either. And not classifieds sites. Better to clean it in advance.
When it matters
- Classifieds listings, especially when the photo was taken at home
- Avatars and personal photos on services you barely know
- Photos for documents, reports, contracts
- Any post where you do not want to reveal your location
- Photos from kids events, schools, kindergartens
What we keep and what we remove
By default the tool wipes all EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata. Optionally you can keep the ICC color profile, which you need when accurate color reproduction matters for further editing.
How to use it
- Drag a photo into the upload area
- If needed, tick "keep the ICC profile"
- Click Clear
- Get a file with no metadata, the size usually drops by 50-200 KB
FAQ
Will the image quality suffer?
No, we only remove metadata, we do not re-compress the pixels. If you want to reduce the weight at the same time, use the "compress photo" tool.
What about PNG and WebP?
PNG and WebP can carry metadata too, and we clean it. The file structure is preserved (the output format is the same as the input).
Can I see what was in the EXIF before cleaning?
After upload the tool will show what data was in the file (GPS, camera, date). If you want to check by hand, there are online EXIF viewers, for example from Adobe or in Photoshop, File Info.
Limits?
Up to 25 MB, 30 files per minute, 200 per day per IP.
How do I remove EXIF data from a photo?
Upload your JPG, PNG or WebP and we strip the EXIF, GPS and camera data instantly. It is free and online, and the format stays the same.
Is it free to remove EXIF online?
Yes. Removing and stripping EXIF metadata here is completely free, with no signup and no watermark.
Related tools
- Compress photo, also removes EXIF and reduces the weight
- Prepare for marketplace, all in one, resize, crop, clean
- HEIC to JPG, a converter
What is actually stored inside the file
Metadata lives in three separate blocks, and all three need to go. EXIF is written by the camera or the phone: coordinates, date and time down to the second, device make and model, sometimes the body and lens serial numbers, orientation, flash state, white balance. IPTC comes from the editorial world: headline, description, keywords, author name, city and country, licensing terms. XMP is added by graphics software: edit history, the Lightroom or Photoshop version, a document identifier, sometimes the folder path on your own drive.
That last item surprises people most often. An XMP block can easily contain a line like "D:\Shoots\Client_Miller\selects", so a single file reveals how your archive is organised and who you work with. A camera serial number ties all of your uploads together: two shots posted on different platforms under different names carry the same body number, and that alone links the accounts.
Worth remembering separately is the embedded thumbnail. It is a small copy of the frame that sometimes survives from the original and does not refresh after retouching. There are documented cases where a cropped or retouched photo gave away the untouched original through that thumbnail.
Privacy: how a geotag reveals an address
The GPS tag stores latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds, plus altitude and the direction the lens was pointing. A consumer phone receiver is accurate to roughly 3-10 meters, worse indoors, but the building and often the floor are still identifiable. Paste the coordinates into any map service and you get a pin on a satellite image.
The leak scenarios are mundane. An eBay or Etsy listing shot on the kitchen table: the buyer downloads the image and knows the seller's address before making contact. A photographer's portfolio with frames taken inside a client's home. A contractor's progress report where the photos show not only the site but the foreman's own address, because a few shots were taken in his garage. A picture of a child near a school, stamped with a date and coordinates.
There is a business angle too. From a series of product shots a competitor can locate your warehouse, and the capture dates tell them when deliveries arrive. Amazon and Shopify re-encode listing images and metadata is usually lost there, but originals often go straight to a buyer or into a chat thread, and there the file travels untouched. Under GDPR a geotagged photo of an identifiable person is personal data, so cleaning files before publication is also the simpler compliance position.
When metadata is useful and should stay
A full wipe is not always the right call. If you are the author and want to assert rights, the IPTC fields Creator, Copyright Notice and Credit Line exist precisely for that. Many aggregators and stock libraries read them automatically, and in an authorship dispute an embedded copyright alongside the original RAW works as evidence. There is no reason to strip those fields before sending work to a stock library or a publication, on the contrary, fill them in beforehand.
The second case is the ICC color profile. Technically it is metadata too, but without it a browser assumes sRGB, so an image shot in Adobe RGB or ProPhoto shifts either flat or oversaturated. On a product listing this shows immediately: the shade of a fabric or a metal stops matching the real item. That is why the profile sits behind its own checkbox in our tool, tick it whenever the file goes on for further editing or to print.
Third is orientation. The Orientation tag tells a viewer how to rotate the frame. We apply the rotation to the pixels before deleting the tag, so nothing ends up sideways. If you strip EXIF by other means, check this specifically, it is the classic reason catalog images suddenly lie on their side.
Bulk cleaning before a catalog upload, and verifying it
When you are handling not one photo but a listing with forty angles, put the cleaning step last in the pipeline, after retouching and resizing. The order is: select the frames, edit them, export at the target size, then run the metadata removal, and only then upload. Clean before retouching and the editor will write a fresh XMP block on export, undoing the work.
Lightroom and Capture One can exclude metadata at export: in the export dialog pick the option that keeps copyright only. Photoshop does the same through Save for Web with the profile and metadata boxes unchecked. Our tool covers the case where source files arrive from different people in different states, which describes most real projects.
Do not verify by eye. Open the file properties in Windows, the Details tab, and there should be no capture date and no camera model left. More reliable is any online EXIF viewer or File Info in Photoshop. Spot-check two or three files from the batch, and if the file size dropped by a noticeable number of kilobytes, the block was genuinely there and has been cut out. The rule is simple: before publishing a catalog, run the whole folder, not just the frames that look suspicious.
Erase, delete or remove: what actually happens to the metadata
The three words are used interchangeably, and in this tool they mean the same thing: the metadata block is stripped from the file and the image is written out without it. Nothing is hidden or merely flagged, the fields are gone.
What gets deleted: GPS coordinates, camera make and model, serial number, date and time, exposure settings, lens, software used, and any copyright or author fields that were filled in. What stays: the pixels and the colour profile, so the picture itself looks identical.
Worth knowing before you erase everything: if you publish professionally, the author and copyright fields are the ones you may want to keep. Removing location data while keeping authorship is usually the sensible middle ground.