Remove metadata from photos

A phone picture of a sofa you are selling can carry the GPS position of your living room, usually accurate to a few metres, along with the date, the time and the exact phone model. The big social networks strip most of this when they publish an image, but many other routes pass the original file through untouched: email attachments, cloud-drive share links, messaging apps sending a photo as a file, small marketplaces and forums. Anyone who saves that file can read the tags with a free EXIF viewer.

Cleaning the photo first means the buyer, the landlord or the stranger in a forum thread gets the picture and nothing else. It matters most for photos taken at home, pictures of children, a car parked outside your house, or anything else that reveals where you live or work.

In a JPG the tool drops the EXIF block (GPS, date and time, camera and lens, serial numbers, the embedded thumbnail), XMP and IPTC data such as captions, authors and editing history, C2PA content credentials, comments, and the extra preview images some phones append after the main picture. In a PNG it drops the eXIf chunk and the text chunks where editors store metadata.

Two things are deliberately kept. The colour profile stays, so the photo does not shift in colour on a calibrated screen. The orientation flag is also rewritten as a tiny block on its own, because without it a portrait shot from a phone would open sideways. Neither says anything about you or where the photo was taken.

Re-saving a photo through an editor strips metadata too, but it recompresses the JPG and loses a little detail each time. This tool instead copies the file piece by piece and leaves out the metadata blocks, so the compressed image data is written back byte for byte. The file shrinks by exactly the size of the blocks removed: often only a few kilobytes, more when the camera stored a preview image or an HDR gain map alongside the photo, and the result screen shows the bytes saved for each file. All of it runs in your browser, so the photo and its location never reach a server.