What EXIF data is and why people remove it
EXIF is a block of descriptive data that cameras and phones embed in photo files. It can include the device model, the capture date and time, camera settings, and in many cases GPS coordinates showing where the picture was taken.
Removing it means producing a copy of the picture that carries only the pixels. The image looks the same to a viewer, but the hidden notes about when, where and with what it was taken are gone.
There are different ways to achieve this. Some tools edit the file's header and delete selected fields. Another approach is to redraw the picture onto a blank canvas and save it again as a new file, which creates a fresh image that never inherits the original's metadata block. This tool uses the second approach.
When stripping metadata makes sense
Share a photo directly, by email, in a chat file transfer, on a forum, or on a listing page that keeps the original, and its embedded details can come along. A picture of an item for sale taken in your living room might carry location information you did not intend to publish.
People strip metadata when posting pictures of their home, sending photos to people they do not know well, publishing images on their own site, or submitting files where only the picture should be seen. It is also a sensible step before sharing images of children or anything you consider sensitive.
If you only want to see what a photo contains before deciding, the Image Metadata Viewer lists it without changing anything.
How to remove EXIF data with this tool
- Drag an image onto the upload area or click it to choose a file.
- A preview of your picture appears.
- Click Remove EXIF data. The image is redrawn onto a canvas in your browser and encoded again.
- A green message confirms that the metadata was stripped, and a Download button appears.
- Click Download to save the clean copy. Use Start over to choose a different image.
The file is processed locally in your browser. It is not sent to a server by this tool.
What changes in the cleaned file
The cleaned copy is always saved as a JPEG at 95% quality, and the download name is your original file name with "-clean.jpg" added. That matters in a few ways. Because it is re-encoded, the result is a new lossy file, so it is not a bit-for-bit copy of the pixels, though quality at that setting is high for ordinary photos.
JPEG does not support transparency. If you upload a PNG with transparent areas, those areas will not stay transparent in the output. Animated images will not stay animated either, since only a single drawn frame is saved. The file size can also differ noticeably from the original.
If you need the cleaned image in another format or at a different size, run the result through the Image Resizer or the Image Compressor afterwards. Always compare the cleaned file with the original before deleting anything.