Privacy Tools

What a photo records besides the picture

Every photo a phone or camera takes is saved with a block of metadata alongside the pixels. EXIF is the common standard, and it typically records the device make and model, the lens and exposure settings, the software that last touched the file, the capture date and time down to the second, and — if location services were enabled — the GPS coordinates where the shot was taken.

None of that is visible when you look at the image, which is precisely the problem. A photo of an item for sale, posted from home, can carry the coordinates of the house it was taken in. A screenshot forwarded from a colleague can carry the timestamp that contradicts what they said about when they saw it. Some platforms strip metadata on upload and some preserve it, and there is no reliable way to tell from the outside which one you are dealing with.

The cases where it matters are ordinary rather than exotic: classified-ad listings, photographs sent to an insurer or landlord, images attached to a public bug report, pictures of children shared outside the family, and anything posted under a pseudonym.

Look before you strip

Removing metadata blindly works, but seeing what was there first is more informative and takes no longer. The metadata viewer reads the EXIF block and reports the camera, dimensions, capture date, and remaining fields, deliberately keeping GPS coordinates hidden until you ask for them so that opening a file does not put a home address on screen by accident.

That inspection step is also how you check whether a platform actually stripped anything. Save the image back down from wherever you posted it, read its metadata, and compare.

Metadata is not always unwanted. Photographers rely on exposure data, and archives rely on capture dates, so the point is to decide deliberately rather than to strip everything by reflex.

View image metadata

How removal works here

The metadata remover redraws the image and re-encodes it in the browser, producing a new JPG, PNG, or WebP built only from the pixels. Because the output is written fresh rather than edited in place, the EXIF block is simply not carried over — there is no partial removal to verify and no hidden field left behind in a corner of the file.

The processing happens in the page, which matters more for this tool than for most. Sending a photo to a metadata-stripping service means handing the untouched original — coordinates included — to that service first, which defeats the purpose. Here the file is read by JavaScript in the tab you already have open and never transmitted.

Two things worth knowing about the result: re-encoding a JPG recompresses it, so save at a quality you are happy with and keep the original if it is an archival copy. And metadata removal is not anonymity — the visible content of a picture, including recognizable interiors and street scenes, still says where it was taken. Cleaning a photo is usually one step in a longer job, so the directory is worth a look for what comes before and after it: cropping, resizing, or converting the same file.

Remove image metadata Every tool in one list