Free online EXIF remover · nothing is uploaded
Remove EXIF Data
Strip EXIF, GPS and every other hidden tag out of your photos before you share them. This EXIF remover rewrites JPEG, PNG and WebP files losslessly — the metadata goes, the picture quality does not. Everything happens in your browser: no upload, no account, no limit.
- Free, no signup
- Batch — clean many at once
- Lossless, no re-compression
- Result verified automatically
Your original file is never modified.
Want to confirm the result independently? Open a cleaned file in the EXIF viewer and check that it reports no metadata.
The full guide
How to remove EXIF data, and when you should.
What you are actually removing
Every photo your camera or phone saves carries a block of tags describing how it was made. The EXIF block records the camera make and model, the lens, the aperture, shutter speed, ISO and focal length, and the exact second the shutter opened. If location services were on when you took the shot, it also carries GPS coordinates — latitude, longitude, often altitude and the compass direction the camera was facing. Editing software layers more on top: XMP blocks from Lightroom or Photoshop, IPTC fields, an author or copyright line, and the name and version of whatever last saved the file.
None of that is visible in the picture, and all of it travels with the file. When you email a photo, post it to a marketplace listing or attach it to a forum thread, the recipient gets the tags along with the pixels and can read them in a couple of seconds. That is what an EXIF data remover is for: it takes the tags out and leaves the image alone. Remove EXIF data from image files before you share them and what you hand over is the picture, nothing more.
The GPS field is the one that surprises people. Coordinates written by a phone are typically accurate to within a few metres, which is precise enough to identify a specific house. A photo taken indoors at home carries your address as exactly as a holiday photo carries the beach.
Lossless removal versus re-encoding
This is the difference that separates a good image EXIF remover from a careless one, and most online tools get it wrong.
JPEG, PNG and WebP are container formats. They are built from length-prefixed segments, and metadata lives in segments of its own, quite separate from the compressed picture data. That means a photo EXIF remover can copy every segment except the metadata ones straight through — byte for byte — and produce a file whose pixels are mathematically identical to the original. Nothing is decoded, nothing is recompressed, and you can repeat the process a hundred times without any degradation. That is what this tool does.
The lazy approach is to decode the image and re-save it. That does remove the metadata, because a freshly encoded file has no tags, but it costs you a generation of JPEG compression every single time. Do it to a photo that has already been through a couple of edits and the artefacts become visible. If a free online EXIF remover does not say which method it uses, it is almost certainly re-encoding.
The rotation trap
There is one case where stripping metadata correctly requires re-encoding, and most tools handle it badly. EXIF includes an Orientation tag, and cameras rely on it: rather than rotating the pixels when you shoot in portrait, they store the image sideways and set a flag telling viewers to turn it. Remove the EXIF block and you remove that flag — so the photo that looked upright suddenly displays on its side.
This tool checks the orientation flag before it does anything. If the photo depends on it, the image is decoded, rotated properly, and re-saved so the correct orientation is baked into the pixels themselves, and the result is labelled so you know a re-encode happened. If the flag is absent or already normal — which covers most files — the lossless path is used. You get a picture that stays the right way up either way.
Removing EXIF data on Mac, Windows and phones
On a Mac, Preview will strip location: open the image, choose Tools then Show Inspector, and use Remove Location Info in the GPS tab. It is quick, but it only touches GPS — the camera, exposure and timestamp tags stay put. For a genuinely clean file, use this page or install ExifTool via Homebrew and run exiftool -all= photo.jpg.
On Windows, right-click the file, open Properties, go to the Details tab and choose Remove Properties and Personal Information. It can write a cleaned copy or strip fields in place, though it is inconsistent about which tags it clears and it struggles with HEIC and WebP.
On iPhone and Android, the share sheet can usually drop location — on iOS, tap Options in the share sheet and turn Location off. Like Preview, that leaves everything except GPS behind. Because this page is a website rather than an app, it runs in mobile Safari and Chrome too, so you can clean a photo properly on a phone without installing an EXIF remover tool at all.
Ways to remove EXIF data, compared
Every method here works. They differ in how much they remove, what they cost you in image quality, and whether your photo leaves your device.
| Method | Where | Image quality | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| This page | Any browser | Lossless for JPEG, PNG, WebP | Batch, verified, nothing uploaded. Falls back to re-encoding for HEIC, TIFF and DNG. |
| Windows file properties | Windows | Varies by format | Built in and free, but inconsistent about which tags it actually clears. |
| macOS Preview | macOS | Lossless | Removes GPS only. Camera, exposure and timestamps stay in the file. |
| ExifTool | Command line | Lossless | The most thorough option and the right one for large batches or RAW files. |
| Screenshot the photo | Anywhere | Lossy, loses resolution | Works in a pinch, but you throw away image quality and the original dimensions. |
| Upload-based online tools | Any browser | Usually re-encoded | Your photo is copied to a third-party server before it is cleaned. |
When to strip, and when to keep
Removing metadata from everything is a mistake. The useful habit is to keep your originals intact and clean the copies you hand out.
Strip it for anything public or semi-public: a marketplace listing, a forum post, a dating profile, a public gallery, a screenshot attached to a support ticket, any image going to someone you do not know. These are the cases where a GPS tag can tell a stranger where you live and a timestamp can tell them when you are not home.
Keep it in your own archive. Exposure settings are how you learn from your own photographs, capture timestamps are what let photo libraries sort and group correctly, and copyright fields are worth having on work you licence. Strip those and you have quietly thrown away the most useful part of your own catalogue.
Do not assume a platform has done it for you. Most large social networks strip metadata on upload as a side effect of re-encoding, but "most" is not "all", and it does not help you at all when you send the original file directly over email, a messaging app that preserves originals, a shared drive or a USB stick. The only reliable way to know is to check the file yourself.
The habit worth building takes about a minute:read the metadata first so you know what is actually in the file, strip it here, then re-open the cleaned copy in the viewer to confirm it is gone.
FAQ
Removing EXIF data — questions people ask.
How to remove EXIF data from a photo?
The short version: add the photo to the tool at the top of this page — drag it in, click to browse, or paste it — and the metadata is stripped immediately. Then download the cleaned copy. Your original file is never modified; you get a new file alongside it.
You can drop several photos at once and clean them in one pass, which is the usual case when you are preparing a batch of images for a listing or a public gallery. Nothing is uploaded at any point: the rewrite happens inside your browser tab.
How to remove EXIF data online for free?
This page is a free EXIF remover with no account, no email, no file limit and no watermark. Open it, add your images, download the cleaned versions.
The thing to check with any free online EXIF remover is whether your photo is uploaded to be processed. Most are server-based, which means the very file you were trying to make anonymous — GPS coordinates and all — gets copied to someone else's machine first. This one rewrites the file locally in JavaScript, so there is no upload and no copy to retain.
Does removing EXIF data reduce image quality?
Not here, in the normal case. JPEG, PNG and WebP files are rewritten losslessly: the tool copies every part of the file except the metadata segments, so the compressed image data is passed through byte for byte and the pixels are mathematically identical to the original.
Most online EXIF removers instead decode the image and re-save it, which re-compresses a JPEG and costs you a generation of quality every time. This tool only falls back to re-encoding in two cases, and it tells you when it does: formats that cannot be rewritten in place (HEIC, TIFF, DNG), and photos whose EXIF contains a rotation flag, where dropping the metadata without baking the rotation into the pixels would leave the picture sideways.
How to remove EXIF data on Mac?
You have three options on macOS:
- This page. Works in Safari, Chrome or Firefox with nothing to install, and handles HEIC files straight from an iPhone. Simplest for one photo or a handful.
- Preview. Open the image, choose Tools → Show Inspector, open the GPS tab and click Remove Location Info. This strips the location but leaves the camera, exposure and timestamp tags in place, so it is a partial fix rather than a clean file.
- ExifTool in Terminal. Install it with Homebrew (brew install exiftool), then run exiftool -all= photo.jpg to strip everything, or point it at a folder for batch work. The most thorough route, and the right one for large volumes.
On iOS, the Photos app can share an image with location removed via Options → Location: off in the share sheet, though that too leaves the non-location tags behind.
How to remove EXIF data from photos on iPhone?
iOS gives you several routes, and it is worth knowing that most of them only remove the location and leave the camera, lens, exposure and timestamp tags untouched.
- This page, in Safari. The most complete option, and nothing to install. Open the tool above, tap the upload area, and pick images from your photo library. Everything — EXIF, GPS, XMP and the rest — is stripped, and it works on HEIC files straight from the camera.
- Remove the location in Photos. Open a photo, swipe up or tap the info button, then tap Adjust beside the location and choose Remove Location. Fast, but location only.
- The share sheet. Tap Share, then Options at the top, and turn Location off before sending. This applies to that share only, and again strips nothing but the coordinates.
- Shortcuts, for batches. Build a shortcut with the Convert Image action and switch Preserve Metadata off. It will run across many photos at once, which the manual routes will not.
- Screenshot the photo. Removes everything, but you lose the original resolution and a generation of quality, so treat it as a last resort.
Whichever route you take, check the result: open the cleaned file in the EXIF viewer and confirm the camera and GPS sections are empty. On Android the picture is similar — the Google Photos share sheet can drop location, but a proper strip still needs a tool like this one.
How to remove EXIF data on Windows?
Windows has a built-in option: right-click the file, choose Properties, open the Details tab and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. You can then either create a cleaned copy or strip selected fields from the original.
It works, but it is inconsistent about which tags it clears and it re-saves some formats. If you want a predictable result — or you are working with HEIC or WebP files, which the dialog handles poorly — use the tool on this page instead and compare the before and after in the EXIF viewer.
Which image formats can this EXIF remover clean?
JPEG, PNG and WebP are rewritten losslessly, with the metadata segments dropped and everything else preserved exactly. HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, AVIF and DNG are cleaned by decoding and re-saving, which removes all metadata but produces a JPEG or PNG rather than the original format — the tool says so on each file.
Files up to 100 MB are accepted. If you need to keep a RAW file in its original format, a desktop tool such as ExifTool is the better choice, since RAW containers are not something a browser can safely rewrite.
What exactly gets removed?
Everything that identifies the camera, the moment and the place: the EXIF block (camera make and model, lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, capture date and time), the GPS block (latitude, longitude, altitude, direction), XMP blocks written by editing software, IPTC and Photoshop resource blocks, author and copyright fields, and free-text comments.
The ICC colour profile is kept by default, because it describes colour rather than you — removing it can visibly shift the colours of a wide-gamut photo. If you want a completely bare file, untick Keep colour profile before adding your images and it will be stripped too.
Are my photos uploaded to remove the metadata?
No. This site is a set of static files with no server-side processing, no upload endpoint and no storage. Your browser reads the file, rewrites the bytes in memory, and offers the result back to you as a download. The cleaned file exists only in your tab until you save it, and closing the page discards everything.
You can verify it in any browser: open the developer tools, select the Network tab, then clean a photo. No request carries your image, because there is nowhere for it to go.
How do I check that the EXIF data is really gone?
The tool re-scans every cleaned file automatically and reports "Verified — the cleaned files were re-scanned and contain no readable metadata" when nothing survives, so you get a second opinion without doing anything.
You can also check independently, which is worth doing if the file matters: open the downloaded copy in our EXIF viewer and confirm it reports no metadata. Comparing the original and the cleaned version side by side is the clearest way to see exactly what was removed.
Should I remove EXIF data from every photo?
No — it depends on where the photo is going. Strip it for anything public or semi-public: marketplace listings, forum posts, dating profiles, public galleries, images attached to a support ticket. The GPS field alone can point at your home to within a few metres.
Keep it for your own archive. Exposure settings are how you learn from your own work, and capture timestamps are what let photo libraries sort and group correctly. The sensible habit is to keep originals intact and strip metadata from the copies you hand out — which is exactly how this tool behaves, since it never modifies the file you gave it.