How to remove EXIF data from photos

Every photo your phone takes carries a block of data describing the circumstances in which it was taken. Most people never look at it, and it travels with the file everywhere it goes.

What is in there

GPS coordinates, if location services were on — typically precise to a few metres, which is enough to identify a home, a workplace or a routine.

Device make and model, and in the maker note, sometimes a serial number. That ties multiple photos to the same physical camera.

Exact timestamps, in several fields — when the shutter fired, when the file was digitised, when it was last modified.

Software, naming what created or edited the file. This is frequently the clearest indicator that an image came from an AI tool.

Authorship, in the artist and copyright fields, which may contain your real name.

Plus exposure settings, lens information and often an embedded thumbnail — which, notoriously, is sometimes a pre-edit version of the picture.

The rotation problem

Here is the thing most EXIF removers get wrong, and it is worth understanding before you use any of them.

Phones generally do not rotate photos when you turn the camera. They store the pixels in the sensor’s native orientation and record how the camera was held in an EXIF tag called Orientation. Every viewer reads that tag and rotates on display.

Strip all EXIF and the tag goes with it. The pixels were never rotated, so a portrait photo suddenly displays sideways — and the damage is not obvious until someone else opens it.

Our EXIF Remover checks for this. If your photo carries a rotation, it preserves exactly one field — the orientation — removes everything else, and tells you it did. If you would rather strip absolutely everything, there is a checkbox for that, with the consequence stated.

Removing it without quality loss

Many online EXIF removers work by decoding the image and re-encoding it. That is the easy implementation, and it costs you quality every single time, because JPEG re-compression is lossy. Run it a few times and you can see the degradation.

There is no need for it. Metadata lives in the container — the marker segments of a JPEG, the chunks of a PNG, the RIFF chunks of a WebP — wrapped around compressed image data that can be copied straight through.

That is how our cleaner works. For a JPEG it rewrites the marker segments and copies everything from the start-of-scan marker onward byte-for-byte. For a PNG it drops metadata chunks and leaves IDAT untouched. For a WebP it rewrites the chunk list, clears the header flags for removed chunks and fixes the RIFF size.

The result: your pixels come out bit-identical. The file is smaller purely because the metadata is gone.

What it will not remove

The colour profile stays. An ICC profile contains no personal information and removing it visibly shifts colours, so keeping it is the right default — we report it as detected but deliberately preserved.

And EXIF removal does not touch anything embedded in the pixels. See Can you remove AI watermarks?.

Verifying it worked

Do not take a tool’s word for it. Ours re-scans its own output and shows you a before-and-after: a signal is marked Removed only when a fresh scan can no longer find it.

You can also confirm nothing was uploaded. Open your browser’s network panel, scan and clean a file, and watch: no request carries your image. Or simply disconnect from the internet after the page loads — everything still works, because it always was working locally.