EXIF Metadata Remover

When you pick an image, its EXIF is parsed and listed: camera model, capture time, aperture and shutter speed, and GPS coordinates if present. This also lets you confirm the opposite — that a given photo carries no location at all.

Whether a photo is geotagged depends on the app, the device settings, and the route it took to get to you. Showing the facts first stops you from either processing images that never needed it or publishing ones that did.

Removal works by drawing the image onto a canvas and writing it back out as a new file. A canvas emits pixels and nothing else, so embedded metadata of every kind is gone — not selected tags deleted, but the whole structure rebuilt.

Because of that, re-inspecting the cleaned file never turns up leftovers. Colour-related information such as the ICC profile goes with it, so photographs shot in a wide colour space can shift very slightly in appearance.

Input can be JPEG, PNG, or WebP. Output is PNG if you supplied a PNG, and JPEG otherwise — so processing a WebP removes the EXIF but also changes the format to JPEG. Worth knowing if the image relies on transparency.

A JPEG input is also re-encoded, which costs a small amount of quality. Take that into account for photographs where the original encoding matters.

The remover deletes data attached to the file, not things depicted in the photograph. A nameplate in the background, the view out of a window, text on a document — all of that stays. Paint over such things with image markup, and use the privacy checker as a pre-publication review.

Before a photo goes onto a marketplace or a social feed: strip the EXIF, paint over anything caught in frame, then compress or resize to a sensible size. Compression and resizing happen to drop EXIF too — but doing it that way means you never see what was in there, and never learn that the photo was geotagged in the first place. That is the argument for checking first.