Remove EXIF

Strip camera, location and editing metadata from a photo without re-compressing a single pixel.

Runs on your deviceImagesWorkingNo account needed

What this tool does

Remove EXIF rewrites the container around your picture and leaves the picture itself alone. The JPEG segments, PNG chunks or WebP chunks that carry metadata are dropped, and the compressed image data is copied across byte for byte. That is the difference between this and re-saving a photo in an editor: there is no second encode, so no quality is lost and no JPEG artefacts are compounded.

What goes depends on the format. From a JPEG it drops the EXIF block, XMP, the IPTC and Photoshop record, the JPEG comment and every other application segment between APP1 and APP13, plus APP15 — which between them hold camera make and model, body and lens serial numbers, exposure settings, the date and time of the shot, GPS coordinates, editing history and captions. Three headers can stay: the ICC profile in APP2 unless you untick it, and the JFIF APP0 block and Adobe APP14 colour-transform marker, which name nobody and tell a decoder how to read the file's density and colour. From a PNG it drops the tEXt, zTXt and iTXt text chunks, the eXIf block, the last-modified chunk and any embedded signature. From a WebP it drops the EXIF and XMP chunks, then clears the header flags that told a viewer to go looking for them.

Two things are kept by default because neither identifies anyone. The ICC colour profile stays, since dropping it can visibly shift colours on a wide-gamut screen. Rotation is kept on a JPEG that actually carries one: when the original orientation tag reads anything but upright, it is rebuilt on its own as a 36-byte Exif segment — a short header around a 26-byte TIFF block holding that single tag — so a photo taken sideways still displays the right way up, and the old JFIF header is dropped in that case because the Exif segment has to come first. An upright photo comes back with no EXIF block whatever the setting says, and switching the setting off does the same for every photo. The rebuild is JPEG-only, so a PNG or WebP that stored its rotation in an EXIF chunk loses it and may come back on its side.

The limits are worth knowing before you depend on it. Only JPEG, PNG and WebP can be rewritten: a HEIC photo from an iPhone is refused with a pointer to the HEIC Converter, while AVIF, GIF, TIFF and BMP are refused with the sniffed format named back to you. Camera RAW is refused as well, usually announced as TIFF because most raw files are TIFF containers. File Metadata Scrubber picks up AVIF, GIF and TIFF on the server, but BMP and raw files have no scrubber here at all. Inside a PNG only the known metadata chunk types are removed, so a private or non-standard chunk written by some other program will survive — and be reported as nothing found. On a JPEG anything appended after the end-of-image marker, such as the video half of a motion photo, travels through with the picture data. And metadata is not the photograph: a street sign, a screen full of text or a recognisable face in the frame is untouched, and the original filename is carried over with -clean appended, so IMG_20240715_143022.jpg still announces when the shot was taken.

How to use it

  1. Add your images. JPEG, PNG or WebP. Several at once is fine — they are processed one after another with the same two settings.
  2. Decide about the colour profile. Keep the ICC colour profile is on by default. It is not personal data, and removing it can change how the photo looks on a wide-gamut display.
  3. Decide about the orientation tag. Keep the orientation tag is on by default and applies to JPEGs. Leave it on for phone photos; switch it off when you want the file to hold no EXIF whatsoever.
  4. Download the cleaned copy. Each file is saved alongside its original name with -clean added. The summary names exactly which blocks were found and how many bytes of metadata went with them.

Processing & privacy

Runs on your device. Your file is processed directly in this browser.

Common use cases

Posting a photo somewhere public

Forums, marketplaces and personal sites often serve the original file untouched, coordinates and camera serial included.

Attaching a photo to a support ticket or a claim

The picture is what the reader needs. The shooting date, the device and the editing trail are not, and they end up in someone else's archive.

Preparing images for a client or a press pack

Captions, keywords and the name of whoever last opened the file in an editor travel inside the image unless they are removed.

Publishing a batch of photos to a website

Running the whole set through in one go leaves the pixels identical, so nothing has to be re-checked for compression damage.

Questions

Are my photos uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read into memory in this browser tab, rewritten there, and handed straight back. Nothing is transmitted, which is also why the tool keeps working with the network switched off.
Does removing the metadata reduce image quality?
No. The entropy-coded scan of a JPEG, the IDAT chunks of a PNG and the VP8 data of a WebP are copied through unchanged. The output is smaller purely because the metadata is gone, not because anything was re-compressed.
Which formats does it refuse?
HEIC and HEIF cannot be rewritten in a browser — convert them with the HEIC Converter first, then clean the result. AVIF, GIF, TIFF, BMP and camera RAW are refused too. File Metadata Scrubber handles AVIF, GIF and TIFF server-side; for a BMP or a raw file there is nothing here yet.
Why does the cleaned JPEG still contain an EXIF block?
Because the photo was rotated and you left Keep the orientation tag on. What remains is a freshly built block holding that one tag and nothing else, not the original. Untick the setting, or start from an upright photo, and the file has no EXIF block at all.
Does an EXIF scrub make a photo anonymous?
It removes what is written beside the image, not what is inside it. Faces, house numbers, a reflection in a window and any text visible in the frame are all still there. Treat this as one step, not the whole job.
I only want the location gone — is this the right tool?
Not quite. This clears everything except the profile and orientation. Remove GPS Metadata rewrites the EXIF block to delete only the coordinates, leaving the camera settings and timestamps in place.
Can I see what was in the file before I strip it?
Yes. Image Metadata Viewer reads the EXIF, IPTC and XMP of a photo without changing it, which is worth doing once so you know what the camera has been recording all along.

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