How to remove metadata from an image
- Add your images to the dropzone, or press Browse files to select them.
- Leave the quality high, 95% keeps the visual result effectively identical.
- Press Remove metadata and let the batch complete.
- Note the size drop, which is the metadata block disappearing.
- Download the cleaned files individually or as a single ZIP.
What gets removed
- EXIF: camera make and model, lens, exposure settings, ISO and capture timestamp.
- GPS: latitude, longitude and altitude recorded by a phone with location services on.
- IPTC and XMP: captions, keywords, copyright strings and editing history.
- Thumbnails: the small embedded preview, which can survive cropping and reveal the original.
- Colour profiles and maker notes, which sometimes carry serial numbers.
- Everything at once, across up to twenty files, with the picture unchanged.
What your photographs are quietly carrying
Every photograph taken on a phone or camera arrives with a block of metadata attached. Some of it is mundane: the shutter speed, the lens, the software that last saved the file. Some of it is not. If location services were enabled, the file records the latitude and longitude where the shot was taken, often accurate to a few metres, along with the exact time.
None of this is visible when you look at the picture. It travels with the file, and it survives being emailed, uploaded to most file-sharing services and copied between devices. Anyone who receives the original can read it with a right-click.
Where this actually causes problems
- Selling something online and posting photos taken at home, which pins your address.
- Publishing pictures of children with the coordinates of a school or house embedded.
- Sending a document photograph to a client that reveals when and where it was signed.
- Sharing images from a workplace where the location itself is confidential.
- Submitting work anonymously while the copyright field still contains your name.
Large social platforms strip metadata when you upload, which has made people complacent. Marketplaces, forums, direct messages, email attachments and cloud folder links frequently do not.
How this tool removes it
The approach is deliberately simple. Your browser decodes the image into raw pixels, paints those pixels onto a canvas, and encodes a brand new file from the canvas. A canvas holds nothing but colour values. It has no concept of a camera model or a coordinate, so every metadata block is simply absent from the output. There is nothing left to overlook.
The visible consequence is a smaller file, since the metadata block was taking up space. The invisible consequence is that JPG output is re-encoded, which is why quality defaults to 95 per cent. If you would rather not re-encode at all, the EXIF remover covers the same ground with the same method but is framed around the specific case of camera and location data.
The embedded thumbnail is worth knowing about
EXIF can contain a small preview image of the photograph. It is generated at capture and, notoriously, is not always regenerated when the picture is edited. There are documented cases of images being cropped to hide part of the frame while the embedded thumbnail still showed the original, uncropped scene.
Because this tool rebuilds the file from pixels, the thumbnail is discarded along with everything else. If you have cropped something out of a photograph for a reason, cleaning the metadata afterwards is not optional.
What is not removed
Be clear about the limits. Anything visible in the picture stays visible, a street sign, a reflection, a screen showing a filename. Metadata removal is not redaction, and it does not touch a visible watermark. If part of the image itself needs to go, crop it out with the image cropper first.
The cleaning itself happens entirely on your device. No copy of the photograph is uploaded, which would rather defeat the purpose of a privacy tool.