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Privacy · lossless
Remove image metadata
Photographs carry a surprising amount of baggage: the exact time, the camera body and lens, the settings, often the GPS coordinates of where you were standing. This tool removes it by editing the file structure directly, so the picture itself is not recompressed.
Result
Why lossless matters here
The usual advice for stripping metadata is to open the photo in an editor and re-save it. That works, but it also throws the image through the encoder a second time, which costs you a generation of quality for no reason. This tool walks the file's marker structure instead, copies across everything that describes the image, and drops everything that describes the circumstances. The compressed image data arrives at the other end byte for byte identical.
What gets removed
- Exif — camera make and model, lens, exposure, ISO, timestamps, and the GPS block if your phone recorded one.
- XMP and IPTC — editing history, captions, copyright fields, keywords added by photo software.
- Comments and any application-specific blocks left behind by editors.
- Colour profile, only if you tick the box. It is left alone by default because removing an embedded profile from a wide-gamut photo can visibly change the colours.
One thing to know about orientation
Exif also carries the orientation flag that tells a viewer to rotate the photo. Removing it means the image displays in its stored orientation, which for some phone photos is sideways. If that happens, rotate the file properly first, then strip.
Common questions
Does this remove location data from my photo?
Yes. GPS coordinates live inside the Exif block, which is removed in full. The result table lists what was found and dropped, so you can confirm it.
Does social media not strip metadata anyway?
The large platforms usually do, when you upload through their app. Files shared by email, messaging apps that send "as a document", cloud folders and direct downloads keep everything. Do not rely on the recipient's software being careful.
Why did the file only get slightly smaller?
Because metadata is small compared with image data. A typical Exif block with a thumbnail is 10 to 60 KB. If you are chasing file size rather than privacy, use a compressor instead.
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