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Pixelsmith

Free browser tool

See what your photo is telling people — then remove it

Every photo taken on a phone or camera carries a hidden block of metadata. This tool reads that block, shows you exactly what is in it, and lets you delete it. Identifying fields — device serial numbers, timestamps, author names and GPS coordinates — are flagged so nothing important gets lost in a wall of tags.

It is for anyone about to share an image with someone they do not fully trust: selling on a marketplace, posting in a public forum, sending documents to an agency, or publishing photos of a home, a child or a workplace.

Unlike most metadata removers, this one does not re-encode your image. It rewrites the file container, drops the EXIF, XMP, IPTC and comment segments, and copies the compressed pixel data across untouched. Your photo comes out visually and byte-for-byte identical in its image data — just without the tags.

Parsing and stripping both happen in your browser. That matters more here than in any other tool on this site: sending a GPS-tagged photo to a remote server to have its GPS tags removed would defeat the point entirely.

Accepts
JPEG · PNG · WebP
Method
Lossless container rewrite
Removes
EXIF · GPS · XMP · IPTC · comments
Uploads
None

EXIF · metadata inspector

Drop an image here

JPEG, PNG or WebP. The file is parsed in your browser — it is never uploaded, so nothing is exposed while you check it.

or paste with Ctrl / ⌘ + V

Step by step

How to use this tool

  1. 01

    Open a photo

    Drop in a JPEG, PNG or WebP. The file is parsed in your browser, so inspecting it exposes nothing.

  2. 02

    Read what is actually inside

    The table lists every tag the tool can decode, grouped by type, with identifying fields flagged. GPS coordinates are shown as decimal degrees.

  3. 03

    Decide about the colour profile

    An ICC profile is not personal data but does affect how colours render, so it is kept by default. Untick the box to remove it too.

  4. 04

    Download the clean file

    The metadata segments are removed and the compressed pixel data is copied byte for byte — same image, no quality loss. Re-open the result to verify it is empty.

Practical guide

A practical guide to photo metadata and what it reveals

Metadata is useful to photographers and dangerous to everyone else. Knowing which tags exist, and how they get there, is what lets you decide what to keep.

What is stored, and by whom

The camera writes the technical record: model, lens, exposure settings, orientation and the capture timestamp. Phones add a device identifier and, if location services are enabled for the camera, latitude and longitude accurate to a few metres.

Editing software then layers on its own tags — an XMP block describing the edit history, an IPTC block with author and copyright fields, and often a plain-text comment naming the application. A single photo can easily carry several kilobytes of this.

  • GPS latitude, longitude and altitude — the precise spot the photo was taken
  • Capture timestamp to the second, and sometimes the time zone
  • Camera make, model and body serial number
  • Lens model and the exposure settings used
  • Software name, editing history and author or copyright fields

How the leak usually happens

Nobody publishes their address on purpose. It happens because a photo of something for sale was taken at home, the phone recorded where home is, and the marketplace passed the file through untouched — or because a picture was forwarded by email, where nothing is ever stripped.

Timestamps are the quieter risk. A set of photos with their capture times intact maps out when a person is at a given place, which is exactly the information you would not volunteer in words.

Why lossless stripping is the right approach

JPEG stores metadata in labelled segments that sit before the compressed image data; PNG uses named chunks; WebP uses RIFF chunks. In all three cases the metadata is separable from the pixels, so it can be deleted by rewriting the container — no decoding and no re-compression.

Tools that strip metadata by re-saving through a canvas or an editor work, but they re-compress the photograph in the process, adding artefacts for no reason. The approach here is what a command-line tool such as exiftool does: surgical removal, identical pixels.

When you should keep the metadata

Metadata is not the enemy in every context. Photographers rely on exposure data to learn from their own work, archives depend on capture dates for ordering, and stock and press images need embedded copyright and credit fields to stay attached to the file.

The sensible rule is to strip on the way out, not on the way in: keep your library intact and clean the copies you share. Orientation is the one tag worth thinking about — a photo that relied on the orientation flag to appear upright may display rotated once it is removed, so check the result before publishing.

Before you export

Important considerations

Honest limits matter more than a longer feature list. These are the trade-offs worth knowing before you download the result.

Pixels are untouched

This tool does not decode or re-encode your image. The compressed image data is copied verbatim, so there is no quality loss and no colour shift.

Orientation may change

Some photos rely on the EXIF orientation flag to display the right way up. Removing metadata removes that flag, so an image may appear rotated. If it does, crop or resize it once to bake the correct orientation into the pixels.

Only JPEG, PNG and WebP

These are the containers whose metadata can be separated from the pixel data in the browser. HEIC, TIFF and RAW files need dedicated software.

The colour profile is a choice

ICC profiles carry no personal data but do affect rendering. They are kept by default; untick the box if you want the smallest, most stripped-down file possible.

It does not anonymise the picture

Faces, street signs, reflections, screen contents and recognisable interiors are all in the pixels. Metadata removal is one layer of privacy, not the whole of it.

Verify before you publish

Re-open the cleaned file in this tool. Zero metadata bytes and an empty table is the confirmation that the removal worked.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is EXIF data?

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a block of structured tags that cameras and phones embed alongside the pixels. It records the make and model, lens, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, orientation, the date and time down to the second, often a device serial number, and — when location services are on — the GPS coordinates where the shot was taken. Editing software adds more: the application name, an edit history and sometimes the author's name.

Why would I want to remove it?

Because it travels with the file. A photo posted in a forum, attached to a marketplace listing, emailed to a stranger or sent to an insurer can reveal your home address through GPS tags, your daily routine through timestamps, and which physical device took it through a serial number. Removing metadata does not make you anonymous, but it closes the easiest and most common leak.

Does removing metadata reduce image quality?

Not here. This tool does not re-encode anything: it rewrites the file container and drops the metadata segments, copying the compressed image data across unchanged. The result is pixel-identical to the original. That is different from most converters, which strip metadata as a side effect of re-compressing the image — and lose quality doing so.

Do social networks already strip EXIF for me?

The large platforms generally do remove most metadata on upload, but the behaviour differs by platform, by upload path and over time, and it does not apply to files you send by email, chat, cloud link or direct download. The only reliable approach is to strip it before the file leaves your device — which is exactly what happens here.

Why keep the ICC colour profile?

An ICC profile contains no personal information. It tells the viewing application how to interpret the image's colours, and removing it from a wide-gamut photo can make it look washed out or oversaturated on a modern display. It is kept by default, but you can untick the box if you want the absolute smallest, most anonymous file.

How can I check the metadata is really gone?

Drop the downloaded file straight back into this tool. A clean file reports zero metadata bytes, an empty tag table and no container segments. You can also check it in any desktop photo viewer's properties or information panel.

Does this remove watermarks or hidden tracking in the image itself?

No. It removes metadata stored alongside the pixels. Visible watermarks and steganographic marks encoded into the pixel values themselves are part of the image data and are untouched — no metadata tool can remove those.

Privacy & security note

This tool never uploads your photo. The file is read as raw bytes in your browser, the EXIF, XMP, IPTC and comment segments are parsed and displayed locally, and the cleaned file is assembled in your tab's memory before being saved to your device.

That design is deliberate. A server-based EXIF remover has to receive the very GPS coordinates and timestamps you are trying to delete, and you have no way to verify what it does with them. Here there is nothing to trust: open your browser's network panel while you strip a photo and you will see that no request carries the file.

We do not log the images you inspect, the tags they contain or the coordinates they reveal, because none of that information ever reaches us.

Read the full privacy policy