Choose a photo to see what is inside it.
Most metadata removers damage your photo, and none of them mention it. The usual way to do this in a browser is to draw the image on a canvas and export it again: the metadata goes because the original is thrown away, and what comes back has been decoded and re-compressed — softer, and often larger than it started.
Here the compressed image data is copied byte for byte and only the metadata blocks around it are left out. The pixels that come out are the pixels that went in.
And one tag is kept on purpose: the orientation. A phone held sideways stores the photo sideways along with a tag saying which way up it goes. Strip that with everything else and the cleaned photo displays rotated — the commonest complaint about these tools, and people blame the photo.
One tag out of hundreds. All it says is that the phone was held sideways.
The file name is not trusted either. The name and the type your browser reports are both guesses from the extension. A JPEG renamed .png arrives claiming to be a PNG — and a tool that believed it would find no PNG chunks, remove nothing, report success, and leave the coordinates exactly where they were.
Because an iPhone writes HEIC by default, and no browser except Safari on Apple hardware can decode one — the codec belongs to the operating system, not to the browser. Reading it here would mean downloading several megabytes of decoder before your photo could even be opened, which this page has not taken on. Two ways round it: set Camera to Most Compatible in Settings so the phone writes JPEG, or share the photo out of Photos, which converts it on the way. Either way what you get is a JPEG and this page will handle it.
No. The file is read from your disk into this browser tab and everything happens there. There is no upload, no server and no request carrying any part of it — which you can check yourself in your browser’s network tab while you use the page. It is the whole reason this tool exists rather than one of the hundred that ask you to upload the photo first.
No, and that is the difference between this and almost every other one. The usual way to strip a photo in a browser is to draw it on a canvas and export it again — the metadata goes because the original is thrown away, and what comes back has been decoded and re-compressed, so it is softer and often larger. Here the compressed image data is copied byte for byte and only the metadata blocks around it are left out. The pixels that come out are the pixels that went in.
Not unless you ask it to. A phone held sideways stores the photo sideways along with a tag saying which way up it goes, and stripping that tag with everything else is what turns a cleaned holiday photo on its side — it is the commonest complaint about metadata removers and people usually blame the photo. The tag is kept by default. It says only that the phone was held sideways, which is not information about you. Untick it if you want it gone anyway.
The page says so before you do anything. Choose a file and the first line reports whether there are coordinates in it — where the picture was taken, usually to within a few metres. It is the fact most people come here for, and a tool that silently cleans gives you no way to know there was ever anything to clean.
EXIF, which holds the camera, the settings, the date, any serial numbers and the coordinates; XMP, which is where editing software writes its history; IPTC, which holds captions and credits; plain comments; and in a PNG, the text chunks, the modification time and anything appended after the end of the image. Every block found is listed with its size before you download anything.
Because removing it changes how the picture looks and tells nobody anything about you. A colour profile describes how the colours should be displayed; take it off a wide-gamut photo and it comes out washed out or too vivid depending on the screen. It is a checkbox rather than a rule, so you can remove it if the smallest possible file matters more.
JPEG and PNG are read and stripped, which covers essentially every photograph a phone or camera produces and every screenshot. TIFF is read but not stripped, deliberately: its metadata and its image data share the same directory structure, so cleaning it means rewriting the file rather than cutting a block out, and telling you a photo is clean when it is not would be the worst thing this page could do. GIF and BMP are read and carry almost nothing in practice.
Because the name and the type your browser reports are both guesses from the extension, not an inspection of the file. A JPEG renamed .png arrives claiming to be a PNG, and a tool that believed it would find no PNG chunks, remove nothing, and report success — leaving the coordinates exactly where they were. This reads the first bytes instead, and tells you when the two disagree.
Yes, and it is stated on the button rather than discovered at ninety per cent. Everything happens in memory in this tab, and the working set is roughly twice the file — the bytes read in and the clean copy written out. Past the limit shown, a mid-range phone starts to struggle, so the file is refused up front with a number.
The photo is read in your browser and nothing about it is transmitted or stored. Metadata removal is not anonymity — the picture itself may still show a face, a street sign or a document, and a file shared somewhere else may have been copied before you cleaned it. Nothing you type here is sent to our servers — the calculation runs entirely in your browser.
