Remove EXIF Data: Photo Metadata Remover

How to remove EXIF data from a photo

1. Choose or drop photos: JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC or HEIF, AVIF, TIFF or GIF, as many as you like. They are rewritten here in your browser.
2. Read the table for each photo: what was found, such as the GPS position and altitude, the time taken with its time zone, the camera, lens and exposure, serial numbers and names, and whether each item is kept or removed.
3. Press Download for each photo, or Download all as ZIP. Cleaned files keep their names with -clean added.

Open a cleaned file here again to check it: it should report no metadata, apart from the colour profile and orientation tag if you kept them.

Why the image quality stays exactly the same

Metadata is not stored in the pixels. Each format keeps it in separate blocks next to the compressed image, so the tool copies the image data byte for byte and leaves the metadata out. Nothing is compressed again.

HEIC and AVIF files keep their size: the metadata items are unlinked and their bytes overwritten with zeros, so every offset in the file stays valid. TIFF files are rebuilt with only the tags needed to draw the image. The Adobe marker in JPEG is kept because some JPEGs decode with the wrong colours without it. Phone JPEGs often carry a second image after the main one, such as a depth map, an HDR gain map or a motion photo clip, which can hold its own EXIF, so it is removed too.

The orientation tag

Many cameras store the pixels as the sensor saw them and set the EXIF Orientation tag (values 1 to 8) so viewers turn the picture. Delete that tag and the photo appears sideways. For JPEG, PNG, WebP and TIFF:

• Keep only that tag writes a tiny EXIF block holding nothing but the orientation value. It stays lossless and reveals nothing about you.
• Remove it too leaves no EXIF at all, so photos that relied on the tag display rotated or mirrored.
• Rotate the pixels re-encodes only the photos that need turning: JPEG and WebP at 92% quality, PNG and lossless WebP without loss, TIFF as PNG. Colours are converted to sRGB. A multi-page TIFF keeps its orientation tags instead, since a PNG holds only one page.

HEIC and AVIF store rotation in their own property, which is kept, so they always stay upright.

What photo metadata can reveal

• GPS position, often accurate to a few metres, plus altitude and the direction the camera faced.
• Date and time to the second, often with your time zone offset.
• Serial numbers of the camera body and lens, which can link photos posted under different names to the same camera.
• An embedded thumbnail that some editors do not update, so it can still show the uncropped original.
• Names and edit history in XMP, IPTC and TIFF tags: author, copyright, computer name, software, captions and keywords.

Photos usually keep all of this when sent as a file in a messaging app, attached to an email or shared through a cloud link. Names such as IMG_20230714_183205.jpg also give away the date and time, so rename the file if that matters.