Remove metadata before sharing photos
Your phone writes where, when and with what into every picture it takes. Removing that before a photo leaves your hands takes a few seconds, and it is the single highest-value privacy habit there is for anyone who posts pictures.
This page covers what gets removed, what cannot be removed, and the mistake that makes people think they have stripped a file when they have not.
Works today, in your browser. Photos open in the editor and Word documents are checked for hidden data; either way the file is read on your device and never uploaded.
What gets removed
Everything in the metadata blocks, which is where the invisible data lives.
- GPS coordinates and altitude
- Date and time of capture, and any modification dates
- Camera make, model, lens and serial number
- Software and editing history
- Author, copyright and description fields
- Embedded thumbnails and preview images
What cannot be removed, and why we say so
Stripping metadata does nothing to what is visible in the picture. A street sign, a house number, a reflection in a window, a face, a card on a table — all of that is image data, not metadata, and no metadata remover touches it.
This is the gap that catches people out. They strip EXIF, believe the photo is anonymous, and post a picture with their front door in it. We mark visible findings separately and say plainly that cleaning will not remove them; covering them is a different action you take deliberately.
The screenshot mistake
A common piece of advice is to screenshot a photo to strip its metadata. It does work — the screenshot is a new file with no EXIF from the original. It also throws away image quality, crops to your screen, and does nothing about anything visible in the frame. Removing the metadata properly costs less and keeps the picture.
Quality: why nothing is re-compressed
A JPEG is a container of marker segments. The metadata sits in its own segments, separate from the compressed scan data that is the actual picture. Removing the first does not require decoding and re-encoding the second.
Many tools decode and re-encode anyway, which loses quality every time. This one edits the container and leaves the scan data untouched, so a cleaned JPEG is bit-for-bit identical in picture content. The only operations that re-encode are covering a region and adding a watermark, both of which are optional and labelled.
How to do it
- 1Open the checkerNo sign-up. It loads and it works.
- 2Add your photosSeveral at once is fine. Each is read in your browser, one after another.
- 3Look at what was foundMetadata findings are marked as removable; anything visible in the picture is not.
- 4Download the cleaned copyYou get a new file with the metadata gone and the picture untouched. The original on your disk is not modified.
Questions
The big ones usually do, because they re-encode what you upload. That does not cover files sent through chat apps as documents, email attachments, marketplace listings, forum uploads, cloud drive links, or anything handed to an AI chatbot. Those keep the original file.
Yes. Drop them all in and each is checked in turn. They are processed one at a time rather than in parallel, which keeps a large batch from locking up the tab.
Yes. PNG stores metadata in text chunks and WebP in RIFF chunks; both are handled the same way, by rewriting the container rather than the image.
Check the cleaned file. Drop it back into this tool and it should come back with no issues found, or inspect it with any EXIF viewer you already trust.
Related
We report no issues found, never “safe”. Absence of detections is not proof of absence, and detection is best-effort.