Remove EXIF Data from Photos

How to remove EXIF data from a photo

1. Choose one photo, or several at once for a batch. JPEG, HEIC, PNG and WebP can be cleaned.
2. Tick what the clean copy should keep. Nothing ticked except the colour profile removes everything else.
3. Press Remove metadata. The tool reads the new copy back and tells you what is gone and what stayed.
4. Download the clean photo, or all of them together as one ZIP file.

Why I clean a copy instead of re-saving it

The usual advice for getting rid of metadata is to open the photo in an editor and save it again. That works, but it compresses the JPEG a second time, and every round costs a little detail. I did not want to pay for privacy with quality, so this tool takes the file apart instead: it drops the blocks that hold the details and writes the compressed picture back byte for byte.

I tried it on two of my own Metelkova photos, exported from Lightroom. The red bicycle went from 718,562 to 650,604 bytes and the figure from 413,246 to 344,708. Most of the difference was Lightroom's record of my edit and a small thumbnail of the photo hidden inside the file. When I decoded the originals and the clean copies, every pixel matched.

Five files before and after

With Copyright and author ticked, the Pentax photo came out at 516,095 bytes: the photographer's name, contact and licence stayed in all three places the file had them, while the position and the name of the city where it was taken were gone. The HEIC keeps its size because its details are overwritten where they are, which is the safe way to change that format.

What is removed and what you can keep

A photo can carry the same fact in three blocks: EXIF from the camera, XMP from editing software and IPTC from agencies and photo libraries. The Pentax sample above had its location in EXIF as GPS coordinates and in IPTC and XMP as the name of the city. Each tick box covers all three, so keeping copyright keeps the author in every block, and removing the location removes the coordinates and the place names together.

Some things always go: the maker notes, which can hold the camera's serial number, the owner's name, comments, editing history and the hidden thumbnail, which can still show a part of the photo you cropped away. Two things always stay because they change how the photo looks: the orientation, so a phone photo is not suddenly sideways, and the colour space note. The colour profile stays unless you untick it.

Is the picture really unchanged?

For a JPEG, yes. The compressed image data, the tables to decode it and the frame header are copied as they are, and the test behind this page decodes the original and the copy and compares every pixel. PNG and WebP keep their image chunks unchanged in the same way. HEIC and AVIF files are not rebuilt at all: the location and the other details are overwritten in place with blanks, and the photo itself is not touched.

RAW files are not cleaned here. RAW software uses their maker notes to develop the picture, so taking them out would harm the file you most want to keep. Export a JPEG and clean that copy.

Sharing photos without the location

Large social networks remove the location when they publish a photo, but the original file you send by email, through a messenger as a document, in a cloud folder or to a marketplace often arrives complete. A clean copy matters most for photos taken at home, for children's photos and for anything you sell online. Check a copy in the viewer before you send it: if Location says Not recorded, the place is not in the file.

Tips for better results

• Clean a copy and keep your original; the original still has the details you may want for your own archive.
• Tick Copyright and author for photos you publish, so your name and licence travel with them.
• Choose up to 20 photos at once and save them as one ZIP instead of one by one.
• Open the clean copy in the View details tab to see for yourself what is left.

Privacy

What you choose here never leaves your device. The photo is read and cleaned in your browser, so nothing is uploaded or stored, and you need no account. The map link sends a photo’s coordinates to OpenStreetMap only when you tap it.

Related tools and guides

• EXIF Viewer: Read the camera, settings, date and GPS location stored in a photo, or remove them.
• Shutter Count Checker: Find out how many photos a camera has taken from a single picture it made. No upload and no software to install; a camera that keeps no count is named as such.
• Image Converter: Convert JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC images directly in your browser.
• Image Compressor: Reduce JPEG, PNG and WebP file sizes while keeping quality high.
• JPG to PDF Converter: Combine JPG, PNG, HEIC and other images into one PDF in your browser.
• Metelkova Ljubljana: My Photos and Complete Visitor Guide: The two photos I cleaned for the table above.
• I Built the Tools I Kept Looking For as a Photographer: Why these tools run in the browser and never upload a file.