See the hidden metadata in a photo (camera, date, even GPS location) and remove it before you share. Stripped losslessly in your browser, so the pixels stay perfect.
Drop a photo here or browse
JPG · PNG · WebP · HEIC — your photo stays on your device
🔒 Your photo is read and cleaned entirely on your device — never uploaded.
Photos often store the exact GPS coordinates where they were taken — revealing your home, school or workplace.
JPG and PNG are stripped without re-compressing, so the image quality is exactly the same.
Everything happens in your browser, so sensitive photos never touch a server.
Every photograph from a phone or camera carries an EXIF block, and its contents are more revealing than most people expect. The routine fields are camera make and model, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO and the exact date and time to the second. Many cameras also record a serial number, which links every photograph a given body has ever taken.
The consequential field is GPS. Phones embed latitude and longitude by default, typically accurate to within a few metres, plus altitude and sometimes compass heading. A photograph taken at home and posted publicly discloses a home address to anyone who opens the file properties — no specialist tooling required.
Beyond EXIF there are other blocks: IPTC fields for copyright and captions, XMP data written by editing software, and a full editing history in some cases. Screenshots and edited exports can carry the name of the software, the account it was registered to, and occasionally the original file path, which may include a username.
Major social networks generally strip EXIF from images they re-encode, and since they resize aggressively for delivery, most uploads are re-encoded. That is a side effect rather than a promise, and it protects the version other users download — the platform itself retains the original with metadata intact.
The gap is everywhere else. Files sent through email, most chat applications when "send as file" or "send as document" is chosen, cloud storage links, marketplace listings, forum attachments and images uploaded to your own website usually arrive with metadata untouched. Marketplace listings are the classic case: a photograph of an item for sale, taken at home, published with coordinates.
Because you cannot easily tell which path an image will take, stripping before sharing is the reliable habit. It costs nothing for images destined for the web, where none of the metadata is used.
Metadata is not purely a liability. Copyright and creator fields matter to photographers, and orientation is functional rather than informational — remove it carelessly and images that relied on the rotation flag appear sideways. A colour profile also matters for wide-gamut images, since discarding it makes colours shift. Good practice is selective removal: drop GPS and device identifiers, keep orientation, colour profile and any copyright you want asserted.
It is equally important to know what stripping does not do. It does not change the image content, so a reflection in a window, a visible street sign, a house number or a distinctive view still identifies a location. It does not remove information encoded in the pixels themselves, such as a visible timestamp burned in by the camera.
Nor does it help if the original has already been shared, since the copy someone else holds is unaffected. Strip before the first upload, not after. Cropping alone does not remove metadata either — the two operations are independent, so run both if you need both.
Hidden metadata in photos: camera model, date, settings and often the exact GPS location. Removing it protects your privacy before sharing.
If it carries GPS, yes — the coordinates are shown and you can open them in Apple Maps, Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, or copy them. Following a link is your choice; nothing is sent anywhere until you click one.
No — JPG and PNG are stripped losslessly, so the pixels are untouched.
No — the file is read and cleaned entirely in your browser.
JPG and PNG are cleaned losslessly — the metadata segments are cut out and the image data is copied through untouched. Other formats are re-saved through the canvas, which also removes metadata. HEIC is a special case, below.
Yes, and reading them needs nothing extra. A HEIC is a HEIF container, and the metadata inside it is the same TIFF structure a JPEG carries — only wrapped differently — so this page parses the container directly and shows you the camera fields and the GPS location in any browser, without decoding a single pixel. That matters because Chrome and Firefox cannot decode HEVC at all, which is why most tools simply reject a HEIC.
Cleaning one is different. A HEIF container cannot be edited in place here, so the cleaned copy is saved as a JPEG — which drops every metadata item as a side effect and produces a file anyone can open. The tool says so on the result rather than implying it was lossless.
Most strip it from the copies other users download, largely as a side effect of re-encoding — but they keep the original. Email, chat file attachments, cloud links and your own website generally do not strip anything.
Only if the orientation flag or colour profile is removed — the first can leave images sideways, the second shifts colours in wide-gamut files. Removing GPS and device fields has no visual effect.