Remove EXIF and Location Data from Photos

How it works

Every photo a phone takes carries an invisible record inside the file: the date and time of the shot, the make and model of the device, and, if location services were switched on, GPS coordinates. Choose the photos from the box or click to pick them, then press Remove metadata. The tool walks through the file's own container, cuts out only the blocks that carry metadata, and copies the compressed image data byte for byte — nothing is decoded and nothing is saved again. A 3.2 MB holiday photo usually carries 20–60 KB of EXIF; after cleaning it downloads at exactly the same quality, with no visible difference at all. If a location record was found, the result line says so in as many words. No file is uploaded anywhere: the whole job finishes inside your browser, which is also why it keeps working when the connection drops.

This tool is also known as remove exif data, strip photo metadata, remove gps location from photo, exif remover, photo metadata remover, delete geotag from jpg.

What is EXIF?

EXIF is the record a camera writes inside the photo file itself: the date and time of the shot, the make and model of the device, exposure settings such as aperture and shutter speed, and, on phones with location services switched on, GPS coordinates. It sits in a block of its own, separate from the pixels, so nothing in the picture tells you it is there — but it travels with the file every time the file is sent. This tool cuts the whole block out and leaves the image data untouched.

What is Geotag?

A geotag is the set of GPS coordinates written into the EXIF block at the moment the shutter fires: latitude, longitude, usually altitude, and the time the position was fixed. Any camera app that has been granted location permission adds them to every frame automatically. One photo dropped onto a map can show a home or a workplace to within a few metres, which is why listings, second-hand sales and forum posts are worth cleaning before the picture goes out.

What is ICC colour profile?

An ICC profile is a small table inside the file that tells a screen or a printer how the numbers in the image should be turned into actual colour. It describes the picture rather than the person who took it, so this tool keeps it. Strip it out and a photo shot in a wide-gamut space such as Display P3 is read as ordinary sRGB, which makes saturated reds and greens look flat or shifted. Keeping it costs a few kilobytes and gives away nothing.

EXIF, XMP and IPTC — what is the difference?

All three are metadata standards that live inside the same file, and one photo can carry all of them at once. EXIF is written by the camera and holds the technical record: time, device, exposure, GPS. IPTC comes from the news trade and holds what a person typed — caption, credit, copyright, keywords. XMP is Adobe's newer XML-based container, used by editing software for its own tags and edit history, and it frequently duplicates fields taken from the other two, coordinates included. Removing EXIF alone would therefore leave a second copy of the same information sitting in the file, so this tool removes all three and keeps only the colour blocks a viewer genuinely needs.

Why the quality does not drop

Most metadata removers open the picture and save it again. JPEG is a lossy format, so every re-save throws a little more detail away, and that loss cannot be undone. This tool never takes that route: it reads the structure of the file, removes only the blocks that hold metadata and copies the compressed image data unchanged. What you download is pixel for pixel the photograph you started with.

Two blocks are deliberately kept. The ICC colour profile describes the picture, not the photographer — remove it and a shot taken in a wide-gamut space can look washed out or shifted on screens that support it. The Adobe marker carrying colour transform information is kept for the same reason, because files exported from Adobe software open with wrong colours without it. Anything a phone appends after the end-of-image marker is discarded, including the short video clip behind a motion photo, since that clip can carry its own location and sound.

What is removed, and what is not

Removed: GPS coordinates, the date and time of the shot, camera and phone make and model, exposure settings, software notes, XMP tags, the IPTC block, JPEG comments, and the text and timestamp chunks inside PNG files. These records live inside the file itself, so they travel with the photo every time you send it as an attachment or hand it over as a file.

Not removed: the picture. A street sign, a house number, a face, or a personal detail visible in a screenshot is not EXIF, and only cropping takes those out. The file name and the modification date your operating system shows are not inside the file either — they stay on your own device and change as soon as the file is copied.

• Before an email or a file transfer → clean it
• Information visible in the picture itself → cropping is the only fix
• Uploading to a social network → most strip EXIF already, but that is not a guarantee

How the location check works

The result line does not only report that something was deleted; it reports whether coordinates were among it. To work that out the tool reads the TIFF directory inside the Exif block and looks for tag 0x8825, the pointer to the GPS directory. When that tag is present the photo was carrying a position, and the line says the GPS and EXIF data were removed.

That check is a report, nothing more. Removal happens either way, because the whole Exif block is cut out regardless of what it contains: a file whose internal directory is malformed still comes out clean, and the tool simply stays quiet about the location rather than guessing at it.

Frequently asked questions

Does the photo lose quality?

No. The image data is not re-encoded, it is copied byte for byte, and only the metadata blocks are cut away. The file you get back is pixel for pixel the same photograph, which is the reason this tool exists in the first place.

How can I check that the location is really gone?

The result line tells you what was found: if coordinates were present it says the GPS and EXIF data were removed. You can also confirm it yourself — on Windows, right-click the file, open Properties and then Details; on macOS, open it in Preview and choose Tools, Show Inspector. The GPS section should be empty.

Do WhatsApp and Instagram not strip EXIF already?

The large social networks and WhatsApp usually strip metadata while they process an upload. Email attachments, cloud links, Telegram's send-as-file option and classified-ad sites pass the original through untouched, and the location record goes with it. If you cannot be sure which route your photo will take, cleaning it first is the certain answer.

Is the capture date removed too, or only the location?

The Exif block is removed whole, so the capture date, the device model and the camera settings go together with the coordinates. There is deliberately no option to delete the GPS field alone: piecemeal cleaning leaves behind the fields nobody thought to look at, and a date plus a device model is still identifying information.

Can I clean HEIC or RAW files?

No. This tool understands the JPEG and PNG containers only, and anything else is refused with a message rather than passed through untouched. Converting a HEIC file to JPG first works, but note that the converter itself may copy the metadata across, so clean the JPG afterwards.