Remove EXIF Data from Photos

Strip GPS location, camera model and timestamps from JPG and PNG photos in your browser. Free and private, no upload, batch support.

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Drop your files here (.jpg, .jpeg, .png)

🔒 Private by design: your files are processed locally in your browser and never uploaded to any server.

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What a photo records without being asked

EXIF is a small block of structured fields written into the file alongside the picture. A typical phone photo carries the make and model of the device, the lens, the focal length, the exposure settings, the software version, the date and time to the second, and, unless you turned location services off for the camera, the latitude and longitude where you stood when you pressed the button, often with an altitude and a compass bearing as well.

None of that is visible in the picture. All of it travels with the file. Anyone who receives the original can read it in a few seconds with a free viewer, and coordinates accurate to a few metres are enough to identify a home, a school run, a workplace or a hotel room.

Large social networks strip this on upload, which lulls people into assuming it is always handled. It is not. An email attachment, a link from cloud storage, a messaging app configured to send originals, a classifieds listing on a smaller site, an attachment to a support ticket or a bug report: all of these pass the file through untouched, tags and all.

Redrawing the pixels is what removes the tags

This tool does not go looking for EXIF fields and blank them out. It decodes the photo to raw pixels, draws those pixels onto a fresh canvas, and encodes a brand new file from that canvas. A canvas holds nothing but colour values, so there is no route by which a tag could reach the output.

That construction is what makes the guarantee strong. There is no field list to keep up to date, no vendor-specific maker note that got missed, and no difference in behaviour between a file with three tags and a file with three hundred. It also covers metadata beyond EXIF proper: XMP blocks written by editing software, IPTC captions, and the text chunks a PNG can carry, none of which have anywhere to live in a canvas either.

The output keeps its original format. A JPG comes back as a JPG, encoded at the quality you set; a PNG comes back as a PNG, written losslessly, with the quality box ignored because PNG has no such dial.

Cleaning a batch of photos

  1. Drop your JPG or PNG files into the box above, or use Choose files. Files accumulate across drops and duplicates are filtered out by name and size.
  2. Leave JPG quality (1–100, PNG is unaffected) at 92 unless you also want a smaller file.
  3. Click Remove EXIF Data from Photos. The progress bar advances once per completed photo.
  4. Download each result. The suffix -no-exif is added before the extension, so beach.jpg arrives as beach-no-exif.jpg and your original stays where it is.

Orientation, colour profile and the rest of the sidecar data

Two of the things a photo carries alongside its pixels are not purely informational, so it is worth knowing what happens to them.

Orientation is the tag that lets a phone save every photo in the sensor’s native layout and note “this one is rotated 90 degrees” rather than rewriting the pixels. Browsers apply that tag while decoding, so the bitmap this tool receives is already upright, and the file it writes needs no tag at all. Your photo is not rotated by the cleaning, and it will now look the same in software that used to ignore the tag.

The colour profile is the other one, and here the trade is real. Nothing copies an ICC profile into the new file, so a photo captured in a wide gamut loses the description of that gamut and is interpreted as ordinary sRGB afterwards. Most photos are sRGB anyway and nothing changes; a deliberately profiled image can look a little flatter. If that matters more than the metadata does, keep the original as your master.

Checking that the tags are really gone

Do not take anyone’s word for it, including ours. Run the original through EXIF Metadata Viewer and note what it lists, then run the cleaned download through the same viewer and confirm it now finds nothing. That takes under a minute and it is the only proof that means anything.

If you would rather keep some fields and remove others, for instance keeping the capture date on a family archive while deleting the coordinates, Edit EXIF Data is the selective tool, for JPGs specifically, and this one is the blunt instrument that also takes a PNG. For iPhone files, HEIC to JPG already produces metadata-free output as a side effect of how it decodes. The rest of the collection sits on the image tools hub.

See it in action

Screenshot of the Remove EXIF Data from Photos tool with sysfenix-sample.png (466 KB) loaded, JPG quality (1–100, PNG is unaffected) set to 92
Remove EXIF Data from Photos mid-process: sysfenix-sample.png (466 KB) loaded, JPG quality (1–100, PNG is unaffected) set to 92.
Screenshot of the Remove EXIF Data from Photos result screen showing sysfenix-sample-no-exif.png ready to download (467 KB)
The finished result: sysfenix-sample-no-exif.png ready to download (467 KB). The download link is a local blob URL — the file never leaves your device.

Frequently asked questions

If the orientation tag is deleted, does my photo come out sideways?

No. The browser applies the orientation tag while it decodes the file, before any of this tool's work happens, so the pixels it hands over are already the right way up. The output is written upright and simply has no tag telling anything to rotate it, which is why it looks identical everywhere including in viewers that ignored the tag before.

Does the embedded color profile survive?

No. The photo is redrawn in the canvas's own standard color space and nothing copies an ICC profile into the output, so a wide-gamut original loses its profile along with everything else. On an ordinary phone photo this changes nothing you can see, but a deliberately profiled image can render slightly less saturated in a color-managed application afterwards.

Can I clean a HEIC photo straight from my iPhone here?

Not directly. This tool accepts .jpg, .jpeg and .png only, and anything else is refused with a message naming the accepted extensions. Run the file through the HEIC to JPG converter first, which decodes to raw pixels and re-encodes exactly the same way, so the JPG it produces already arrives without EXIF.

Does it also remove the little preview thumbnail inside a JPEG?

Yes. That thumbnail is stored inside the EXIF block itself, which is why an edited photo sometimes shows an out-of-date preview in a file browser. Since the output is built from decoded pixels and nothing writes an EXIF block into it, the embedded thumbnail is gone along with every other tag.

Why is the cleaned JPG a different size from my original?

Because it is a genuinely new encode rather than the same file with a section deleted. Losing the metadata takes off a few kilobytes, and re-encoding at the quality you chose changes the rest, so the file can end up either smaller or larger than the source. PNG output changes size for the same reason, and its pixels survive intact unless the source was 16 bits per channel or partly transparent, which the canvas reduces to 8 bits and premultiplied alpha.

Is a quality of 92 low enough to see?

Not in normal viewing. 92 sits near the top of the JPEG scale and is the default here precisely because stripping metadata should not be a reason to damage a photo. Lower it only if you want the file smaller as well, and remember that this is a second lossy save on top of whatever the camera already did.

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