EXIF Viewer & Remover
See exactly what your photo records about you — camera, date, and often the location — then cut it out without touching a single pixel.
Drop an image here
Nothing is uploaded. The file is read in this page.
What this file reveals
Add a photo to see what it carries.
This file carries no metadata at all, so there is nothing to remove.
Everything here runs on your device. Nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.
Every photo your phone takes carries a block of metadata alongside the pixels. Some of it is genuinely useful — the exposure settings, the lens, the date. Some of it is a precise record of where you were standing, and it travels with the file to anyone you send it to.
How to use it
- Drop a photo onto the panel, press Choose an image, or paste from your clipboard.
- Read the summary. Anything sensitive is called out first, with GPS rows marked in red.
- Leave the mode on Remove metadata only unless your file is WebP or AVIF.
- Press Remove metadata to download a clean copy.
The two ways to strip metadata, and why the difference matters
Almost every “remove EXIF” tool online does the same thing: it draws your image onto a canvas and re-encodes it. Metadata cannot survive that, so it works, and it works on any format. What those tools do not mention is that your photograph has just been through a second generation of lossy compression. A 4MB JPEG comes back softer, sometimes larger, and always different at the pixel level.
Byte surgery is the honest version. A JPEG is a sequence of labelled segments; the metadata lives in specific ones, and the entropy-coded scan data lives in another. Removing the metadata segments and copying the scan data across verbatim produces a file whose image content is bit-for-bit identical to the original. Nothing is recompressed, because nothing is decoded. This is what removing metadata should always have meant, and it is the default here.
Re-encoding is still offered, because WebP and AVIF store their metadata in container structures that cannot be safely edited in place. When you pick it, the tool tells you what it costs.
What the tags actually reveal
The summary at the top is ordered by how much people care, not by tag number.
Location is the one that surprises people. A GPS fix in a photo is accurate to a handful of metres, and it is recorded silently by default on most phones. A photo of a sofa taken indoors gives away the address the sofa is in. The row is coloured red and comes with a map link, because a pair of decimal coordinates in a grey table is not a disclosure anybody notices.
Device identity is the subtler one. Camera bodies and some phones record a serial number. Anywhere those photos are published, that number links them into a single set attributable to one device — which is a stronger identifier than it looks once a few of those photos have your name attached.
Timestamps record when, to the second, sometimes with a timezone offset. Software records what edited the file, which occasionally reveals more than intended.
Everything else — aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, white balance, orientation — is technical, useful and harmless.
The size of it
The tool reports the metadata as a share of the file. On a small web-sized image it can be a surprising fraction of the download, particularly when an embedded thumbnail is present. That thumbnail is worth knowing about for a second reason: it is a separate small copy of the image, and if the main image was cropped by some editors the thumbnail was not, so the uncropped version can still be sitting inside the file.
What runs where
The file is read in the page using a FileReader and parsed in JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded, no request is made, and the coordinates you can see are not sent anywhere — the map link only opens if you click it.
Questions
Does removing EXIF data reduce the quality of my photo?
Not with the default mode. It performs byte surgery on the container — the metadata segments are cut out and the compressed image data is copied across verbatim — so the pixels come out identical to the original, bit for bit. The re-encode mode does cost quality, because it redraws and re-compresses the image, and the tool says so before you use it.
Do social networks already strip EXIF when I upload a photo?
Most of the large ones strip it from the public copy, but not all, and not for every upload path. Direct file sharing, email attachments, cloud links, forums, marketplace listings and messaging apps that send originals frequently preserve everything including GPS. Relying on someone else's pipeline to protect your address is a poor bet when checking takes ten seconds.
What in EXIF is actually sensitive?
The GPS coordinates first — accurate to a few metres, they show where a photo was taken, which for a photo taken at home is your home. Then the camera or phone serial number, which links every photo you have ever posted from that device into one set. The date and time can also matter. Exposure settings and lens data are technical and harmless.
Why can WebP and AVIF only be cleaned by re-encoding?
They store metadata inside container structures this tool does not rewrite in place, so cutting the tags out safely is not possible. Redrawing the image to a canvas discards metadata as a side effect, which works on any format, but it compresses the picture a second time. The tool marks this clearly rather than quietly re-encoding and calling it removal.
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