Remove EXIF Metadata

What EXIF actually records

EXIF is a standard metadata block embedded in the image file itself, defined by the camera industry in the 1990s and written by nearly every phone and camera since. None of it is hidden in any technical sense — viewers and free EXIF readers surface it in one click; it is simply invisible by default, which is how photographs with home coordinates in them get shared without anyone noticing. What it typically contains is a privacy inventory:

• GPS latitude and longitude, when the camera had a location fix — a precise point, not a city.
• The capture timestamp, to the second, along with the original file's creation history.
• Camera make, model, and sometimes the lens and body serial number — proof of ownership, or of where a leak originated.
• Shooting settings, software versions, and often a small embedded preview thumbnail.

What survives a re-encode — and what does not

The re-encode is decisive because the pipeline goes through raw pixels: the decoder produces an image, the encoder writes a brand-new file, and nothing from the original's metadata blocks is consulted on the way. GPS, camera details, timestamps and the embedded thumbnail are all dropped. The single EXIF tag that is honoured rather than discarded is orientation — it is applied to the pixels during decode, so a sideways-shot photo comes out upright instead of falling over.

Two honest details. First, this is total: there is no "remove only the location, keep the camera info" option, because the pipeline does not preserve anything selective. Second, dropping the whole block also removes the leak class where an old embedded preview shows the original, un-cropped frame from before an edit — a real failure that has exposed photographs before, and one that survives only in files still carrying their original thumbnail.

Social platforms strip it anyway — but not everywhere

The big social platforms re-encode uploads, so Instagram, Facebook and the like discard EXIF on the way in — posting there is itself a lossy conversion. The trap is everything else: email attachments, messaging apps when a photo is sent as a file, cloud-folder sync, marketplace listings, forums and print shops can pass the bytes through untouched, GPS block included. And screenshots, the folk remedy, do drop metadata but at the cost of a fresh lossy generation and lower resolution — a crude stripper at best.

So the honest rule is: strip before sharing, and treat platform stripping as a bonus rather than a plan. It is the recipient you did not expect — the email attachment, the shared folder — who actually reads the coordinates.

Verify before you share

Checking takes under a minute. Open the output in any EXIF viewer — most operating systems show photo information panels, and command-line users can run exiftool on the file — and confirm the GPS, camera and timestamp fields are absent. Two things are worth confirming while you are there: that the metadata is gone, and that the image still looks right, because a quality dial dragged too low trades a privacy win for visible artefacts. If the file passes both checks, it is ready to leave the machine.

Why no-upload matters double here

The photos people strip are, by definition, the private ones: a new home not yet listed, children's faces, documents on a kitchen table. An upload-based metadata remover therefore receives the exact object you are trying to protect, coordinates and all, before handing back a copy. Here the decode and re-encode happen inside your browser tab — open DevTools, watch the Network panel while a photo converts, and no request carries it; the page's Content-Security-Policy sets connect-src 'self', so the browser would block an upload attempt outright. The original never leaves the machine, and neither does the stripped copy until you download it.