See exactly what a photo reveals, including where it was taken, the camera, serial numbers and the time to the second. Then download a clean copy with all of it removed, without re-compressing the picture.
JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 100 MB. The photo stays on your device.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your photo is never uploaded; it is read and cleaned on your device. Nothing leaves your browser unless you click Open in OpenStreetMap, which sends the coordinates to OpenStreetMap.
What a photo file says about you
A photo from a phone or camera is two things in one file: the picture, and a block of notes the device wrote about it. Those notes, mostly in a format called EXIF, are invisible when you look at the image and fully readable by anyone who has the file. With location services on, a phone records GPS coordinates that are usually precise enough to pick out a single house. It also records the exact second the shutter fired, your time zone, the phone model and lens, and sometimes serial numbers that tie every photo from that device together.
Whether that data reaches anyone depends on how the file travels. Large social networks generally strip it from the copy they show the public. An email attachment, a cloud share link, a marketplace listing, a forum upload or a messaging app set to send the original file delivers it intact. The safest habit is to clean a photo before it leaves your hands. For a fuller tour of what can leak, read what your photos reveal.
| Field | What it gives away | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| GPS latitude and longitude | Where the photo was taken, often your home or workplace | EXIF GPS section, sometimes XMP |
| Date taken and time offset | When you were there, and your time zone | EXIF |
| Make, model and lens | The exact device you own | EXIF |
| Body and lens serial numbers | A fingerprint that links all your photos from one camera | EXIF, manufacturer notes |
| Artist, owner name, copyright | Your name, if it was ever typed into the camera or an editor | EXIF, IPTC, XMP |
| Software and edit history | Which apps touched the file, and sometimes each edit | EXIF, XMP |
| Embedded thumbnail | A small copy of the image, possibly from before a crop | EXIF |
| Generation settings | The full prompt and seed of an AI-generated image | PNG text entries |
How the cleaning works without touching the picture
Image formats are built from labeled blocks. A JPEG is a series of segments: some hold the quantization and Huffman tables a decoder needs, one holds the compressed picture, and others hold metadata. PNG and WebP work the same way with chunks. This tool walks those blocks, drops the ones that carry metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPTC, comments, PNG text and timestamps), and copies everything else exactly as it was. The compressed image data is never decoded, so there is no second round of compression and no loss in quality. The cleaned file comes out a little smaller and looks identical.
That is different from the common shortcut of opening a photo and saving it again. Re-saving a JPEG compresses it a second time, which softens detail, and some editors quietly copy the metadata into the new file anyway.
A few blocks are kept on purpose, because the picture needs them to display correctly:
- The color profile. Recent phones shoot in a wide color space such as Display P3. Without its ICC profile the photo is shown as if it were plain sRGB, and colors look dull. A profile describes color, not you, and is usually one shared by every phone of that model.
- The Adobe marker and JFIF header. These tell a decoder how the color channels are stored. Some JPEGs show wrong colors without them.
- Orientation. Phones store pixels the way the sensor captured them and add a tag such as “rotate 90 degrees clockwise”. Remove it blindly and portrait photos turn sideways. When a photo needs rotating, the tool writes back a new EXIF block containing that single value and nothing else.
Some phones also hide extra data after the end of the picture. Motion photos on Samsung and Google Pixel phones append a short video clip, and HDR photos can carry a second image layer. That clip can contain sound and its own location, so the tool removes everything after the image ends and tells you it did. The cost is that a motion photo becomes a still photo.
After cleaning, the tool reads its own output again from scratch and confirms that no EXIF, GPS, XMP or IPTC data remains before it offers the download.
What metadata removal cannot fix
Stripping metadata hides where the file says it was taken. It does nothing about what the picture shows. A house number, a street sign, the view from a window, a reflection in a mirror or sunglasses, a school logo or a distinctive skyline can place a photo just as precisely, and people who geolocate images for a living rely on exactly those details. Look at the whole frame before you share it.
File names can leak too. Many phones name files after the moment they were taken, such as IMG_20240601_143045.jpg, so rename the cleaned copy if the date matters. And cleaning a copy does not change the original: it still has its location in your camera roll and in any cloud backup.
Stop recording location in the first place
If you rarely want location in your photos, turn it off at the source. On an iPhone, go to Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Location Services, then Camera, and choose Never. For a one-off share, tap Options at the top of the share sheet and switch off Location. On Android, open the camera app’s settings and turn off the option called location tags or save location, depending on the manufacturer. Photos you have already taken keep their coordinates, which is what this tool is for.
This tool handles JPEG, PNG and WebP. The iPhone’s default HEIC format is not supported. To get a JPEG, set Settings, then Camera, then Formats to Most Compatible, or export the photo as JPEG from Preview on a Mac.
