EXIF Viewer & Remover

What stripping EXIF does not do

This is the part most metadata tools leave out, and it matters if you are removing metadata because something is actually at stake. A photo with a clean header is not an anonymous photo. Three things survive, and none of them are in the header:

• What is in the picture. A street sign, a house number, a train station, the view from a window, a reflection in a mirror or a pair of glasses. Location has been recovered from photographs by people looking at them long before EXIF existed, and it remains by far the most common way a photo gives away where it was taken.
• The camera's sensor fingerprint. Every image sensor has a fixed pattern of tiny manufacturing variations between its pixels, and that pattern is imprinted faintly on every photo it takes. It is called photo-response non-uniformity, it survives resizing and re-compression, and it is used in forensic work to tie a photo to one specific physical camera — not just a model. It lives in the pixels, so no metadata tool can touch it.
• Everything the platform adds back. Upload the clean file and the service records the upload time, the account, and the IP address it came from. That is usually a far shorter path to identifying you than anything that was in the file.

None of this means stripping metadata is pointless — GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres, sitting in a file anyone can read with a right-click, are worth removing, and a serial number that links every photo you have ever posted to the same camera body is worth removing too. It means metadata removal is one step, not a cloak. If the stakes are genuinely high, the safer move is not to share the original photograph at all.

Your clean copy is a re-encode, not a trim

This tool does not cut a header off your file. It decodes the image, draws the pixels onto a blank canvas, and encodes an entirely new file from them. That is what makes the metadata removal complete — nothing of the original container survives, so there is nowhere for a stray tag to hide, and it works even for formats whose metadata this page cannot read.

The cost is that a JPEG comes out having been compressed one more time, at quality 92. On a single pass that is close to invisible; run a photo through repeatedly and it will degrade. Keep your original and share the clean copy rather than replacing one with the other. PNG is rebuilt losslessly, so nothing is lost there.

The tool reports the before and after size on every download so you can see what happened rather than take our word for it.

Frequently asked questions

Is my photo uploaded to your server?

No. Both the metadata reading and the cleaning happen entirely inside your browser — the photo never leaves your device. That's exactly why this is a safe way to inspect sensitive photos.

Does removing EXIF reduce image quality?

Slightly, and honestly: the clean copy is created by re-encoding the pixels (JPEG at 92% quality), so the file size will change a bit and there's a tiny, generally invisible quality loss. PNG sources are re-saved as PNG, which is lossless. The image dimensions never change.

Do PNG and WebP files have EXIF too?

They can, though it's much less common — EXIF is mainly a JPEG (and HEIC) thing, since those come straight from cameras. PNG screenshots rarely contain location data, but they can carry software tags and text chunks. The clean-copy download strips metadata from those formats as well.

My photo says "No EXIF metadata found" — is it really clean?

It means the standard EXIF block is absent, which covers camera, date, and GPS data — the sensitive parts. Screenshots and images already processed by social networks usually show this. If you want certainty, downloading the clean copy guarantees a metadata-free file either way.

Will the cleaned photo still look right side up?

Yes. Modern browsers automatically apply the photo's orientation before it's redrawn, so the clean copy is saved the way you see it — no sideways or upside-down surprises.