Remove EXIF Data from Your Photos

What EXIF data actually gives away

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a block of information your camera writes inside the image file itself. It travels with the photo. Copying the file, emailing it, or putting it in a Google Drive folder all carry the metadata along, because it is part of the file rather than something attached to it.

Most of it is harmless. Shutter speed and aperture tell nobody anything. Three fields are the ones worth caring about:

• GPS coordinates. If location services were on for your camera app, the file records where you were standing, usually to within a few metres. This is the one that matters. A photo of a pet in a living room carries the home address in it.
• Date and time. Both when the shot was taken and when it was last edited. Combined with GPS, that is a record of where someone was at a specific moment.
• Device serial numbers. Higher-end cameras write a body serial and a lens serial. Those tie separate photos to the same physical camera, even across accounts.

Which platforms strip it for you, and which do not

This is the part most guides get wrong by saying "social media removes it". Some do, some do not, and some strip it from the displayed image while keeping the original. Treat the table below as a starting point rather than a guarantee, and verify anything that matters to you by downloading your own image back and checking it here.

The safe habit is simple: strip it at your end, before the file leaves your device. Then it does not matter what the receiving platform does.

Why this tool does not re-compress your photo

A lot of "remove metadata" tools work by drawing your image onto a canvas and exporting a fresh JPEG. That does remove the metadata, but it also throws away quality, because the image gets compressed a second time. Do it a few times and you can see the damage.

This tool works on the file structure instead. A JPEG is a sequence of labelled segments, and metadata lives in its own segments (APP1 for EXIF and XMP, APP13 for IPTC, and so on). Removing those segments and writing the rest back out leaves the compressed image data completely untouched. Your pixels come back byte-for-byte identical. PNG works the same way, with metadata living in text chunks that can be dropped cleanly.

There is exactly one exception, and the tool tells you when it applies. If your photo carries an orientation flag, that flag is metadata too. Remove it and the image can appear rotated. In that single case we bake the rotation into the pixels first, which does require a re-encode. It is the honest trade, and you get to see it coming.