Image EXIF Stripper

EXIF IMAGE PRIVACY

About this tool

Remove photo metadata + GPS

Remove EXIF, GPS, IPTC, and XMP metadata from photos. Batch supported. Nothing uploaded.

RT-IMG-023 · Image & File

Drop one or many photos here, or click to choose JPG · PNG · HEIC · WebP · TIFF — batch supported

Output format JPEG/WebP quality

💡 How the strip works: the tool re-encodes your image's pixels through a fresh canvas. By spec, canvas-encoded blobs carry no EXIF, IPTC, XMP, or thumbnail data — so the output is metadata-clean by construction. The EXIF orientation tag is applied to the pixels first, so portrait photos stay portrait after the strip.

Drop images to begin.

🔒 Photos stay on your device. Reading metadata uses the self-hosted exifr library. Stripping uses your browser's own canvas. Nothing is uploaded — verify in DevTools → Network.

How to remove EXIF metadata from a photo

Add your photos

Drop one image or hundreds. JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, and TIFF are all supported. Each file is processed independently — a failure on one doesn't stop the others.

Pick the output format

Auto keeps PNGs as PNG (preserves transparency) and converts everything else to JPEG. Force PNG is the right call if you need lossless output or alpha channels. Force WebP gives the smallest file size at decent quality.

Click Strip metadata

Each photo is re-encoded through a fresh canvas. The "before" scan shows you what was actually stripped — number of EXIF tags, plus a flag if GPS coordinates were embedded. Already-clean images are flagged too.

Download — one or all

Use the per-row Download button to grab a single result, or Download all to trigger every output at once. Files are saved as {originalname}-no-exif.{ext}.

EXIF, GPS, and the metadata that follows your photos everywhere

Every photo you take with a smartphone or DSLR carries an invisible second payload: EXIF metadata. The camera writes a structured block of data into the file alongside the pixels — the camera make and model, the lens, the shutter speed and aperture, the ISO, the exact date and time, and, almost always by default, your GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres. That data was designed for professional photographers in 1995 to track their gear and shots. It's now the standard payload of every JPEG, HEIC, and TIFF in the world — and most users don't know it's there until they accidentally publish a photo with their home address embedded.

Why stripping matters more than ever

Social media platforms remove EXIF before showing your photos to the public — Instagram, Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Threads all strip on upload. But that's only the visible copy. The original you sent in a WhatsApp file (not a photo), the one you emailed as an attachment, the one you uploaded to your Google Drive, the one shared in a Telegram cloud chat, the one a tradesman sent you back as "here's the leak" — all carry intact metadata. Photographs sent to public forums, marketplace listings, customer service requests, and freelance gig portals routinely leak GPS data. Strip first, share second.

Instagram strips EXIF. Email doesn't. WhatsApp's "send as document" doesn't. Marketplace listings don't. Strip your photos before they leave your device — not after.

The APAC privacy threat model

Across Singapore's tight rental market, Malaysia's Mudah and Carousell secondhand listings, Indonesia's warung-level WhatsApp commerce, Vietnam's real-estate photo shares, the Philippines' OFW family-photo updates, Thailand's LINE-based group chats, and Hong Kong's Carousell and Telegram marketplaces — photo sharing is constant and often public. Each of those platforms either preserves EXIF on file uploads or has done so historically. Singapore's PDPA, Malaysia's PDPA, Thailand's PDPA, and the Philippines' Data Privacy Act all consider GPS location to be personal data; sharing photos with embedded location is a real (if low-prosecution-risk) regulatory matter. The defensive posture is: strip before you share.

How the strip works under the hood

HTML5's canvas element decodes the pixels of an image and re-encodes them through toBlob(). By the canvas spec, the resulting blob carries no metadata: no EXIF, no IPTC, no XMP, no embedded ICC profile (in browsers' default mode), no thumbnail, no maker notes. The strip is structural — it's not "delete the EXIF block," it's "produce a new file from the pixels only." That's a stronger guarantee than scrubbing the metadata in place. The trade-off is that re-encoding is lossy for JPEG/WebP — the tool defaults to quality 0.92, which is visually indistinguishable from the original for everything except critical photography work. Use PNG mode if you need lossless output.

10 Things to Know About Image Metadata

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) was created in 1995 by JEIDA, the Japanese camera industry standards body, to help photographers track their shooting parameters across rolls of digital film.

Modern smartphones embed GPS coordinates in photos by default with accuracy of 5–10 metres — enough to pinpoint a specific room in an apartment block.

The 2007 "John McAfee Belize" incident — where journalists located the fugitive antivirus founder via EXIF GPS in a Vice magazine photo — is the textbook case study for why EXIF stripping matters.

Instagram strips EXIF on upload. Twitter strips most fields but preserves orientation. Facebook strips. WhatsApp strips when sending as a photo, but NOT when sending as a file/document.

The IPTC metadata block — separate from EXIF — is the journalist's standard. It carries captions, credits, and copyright. News agencies write IPTC; smartphones don't.

XMP (Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform) is the third major metadata layer, used by Photoshop and Lightroom to track edit history. This tool strips all three (EXIF + IPTC + XMP) in one pass.

The EXIF Orientation tag is the trickiest tag in computing — it tells viewers "rotate this image 90° before showing." Stripping without honouring it produces sideways photos. This tool applies it to pixels before stripping.

HEIC (Apple's iPhone format) packs EXIF + GPS into the file's uuid box. Browsers that can decode HEIC still strip on canvas re-encode — the metadata can't survive the pixel-only round-trip.

Camera-maker thumbnails embedded in EXIF (a small preview JPEG) sometimes preserve the BEFORE state of edits. A photo Photoshopped to remove an object can leak the original via the thumbnail. Strip removes the thumbnail too.

The exifr library used here is MIT-licensed, ~50 KB minified, supports JPG/HEIC/TIFF/PNG/WebP/RAW, and is the most widely-used JavaScript EXIF parser in the world.

FAQ

No. EXIF reading uses exifr (self-hosted JS). Stripping uses your browser's own canvas. The photo bitmap is decoded, redrawn, and re-encoded — all in memory. Open DevTools → Network and watch — there's zero outbound traffic.
For JPEG and WebP output: yes, very slightly (each is lossy by spec; re-encoding adds one generation of loss). At the default quality 0.92, the change is visually indistinguishable for almost all photos. For lossless output, use the PNG mode — re-encoded PNG is bit-identical to the original pixels.
It shouldn't — this tool reads the EXIF Orientation tag before stripping and applies the rotation to the pixels themselves. So a portrait photo stored landscape-with-orientation-6 comes out as actual-pixels-portrait with no rotation tag. If you see a sideways photo, it's a bug — please report with the input file.
It depends on your browser. Safari and recent Chrome on macOS decode HEIC natively — stripping works fine. Other browsers may not decode HEIC at all, in which case the file fails with a "format unsupported by your browser" message. Convert to JPG first via macOS Preview or another tool.
Yes — drop them all, click Strip, then Download all. The tool processes them sequentially (so memory stays bounded). Download all triggers each file as a separate download with a 250ms gap, which most browsers handle fine. You may get a "this site is attempting to download multiple files" prompt — click Allow.
If you upload a stripped photo: no. The platforms strip EXIF anyway, but if the original carries GPS, it briefly lives on their servers before being stripped. Stripping locally means the location data never leaves your device.
No — that's part of EXIF, so it's stripped. The OS will still timestamp the file with "today" as the modification date. If you need to preserve the original capture date, run a separate tool that explicitly preserves DateTimeOriginal while stripping everything else.
Renaming changes nothing inside the file — EXIF + GPS + thumbnails all stay intact. Stripping rebuilds the file from the pixels only, with no metadata. Renaming is purely cosmetic; stripping is the actual privacy fix.
In most browsers, canvas re-encode applies the input ICC profile during decode and writes the output in sRGB without an embedded ICC profile. Visually identical for almost all photos, slightly different for wide-gamut camera shots (P3, Adobe RGB). For colour-critical work, use a desktop tool like ExifTool which can strip metadata while preserving the ICC block.
No — your original file is never touched. The tool reads it into memory, produces a new stripped copy as a download, and that's it. The original on your device is exactly as you left it. Delete it yourself if you want only the stripped version to remain.

Image EXIF Stripper