EXIF Viewer & Metadata Remover

What a phone photo actually carries

A JPG straight off a modern phone is not just pixels. Sitting in front of the image data is an EXIF block, and it is usually a lot more detailed than people expect.

Drop a photo above and you will typically see rows like Make: Apple, Model: iPhone 14 Pro, LensModel: iPhone 14 Pro back triple camera 6.86mm f/1.78, FNumber: 1.78, ExposureTime: 0.0166, ISO: 64, Orientation: 6 and often a Software string naming the OS build or the editing app that last touched the file.

The row that matters most is the one underneath the table. If the photo was taken with location services on, this page prints the latitude and longitude to six decimal places and gives you an OpenStreetMap link. Six decimals is roughly a tenth of a metre. That is not "the suburb", that is the corner of the room you were standing in.

Three situations where this is worth checking

Selling something online from home. You photograph a bike in the driveway, the listing photo keeps the GPS tag, and anyone who downloads the original file knows your address before they message you. Many large marketplaces strip EXIF on upload, but not all do, and messaging apps vary. Checking takes ten seconds.

Rental and holiday listings. Interior photos of a property, posted with coordinates attached, tell people exactly which unit is empty and when the photos were taken.

Photos of children. A school gate, a sports ground, a front yard. The picture is innocuous, the coordinate pair beside it is not. Strip it before it goes into a group chat or a public post.

There is a legitimate other side to this. Photographers use EXIF to review what settings produced a good frame, and archivists rely on DateTimeOriginal for sorting. Look at the data before you decide to destroy it.

How the stripping works, and what it costs you

This page does not surgically edit the EXIF segment out of the file. It redraws the decoded image onto an HTML canvas at its full pixel dimensions and re-encodes it. Metadata lives outside the pixel array, so none of it survives the trip. That is the good news.

The trade-offs are real and you should know them before you strip a photo you care about:

It is not lossless. Anything that is not a PNG comes back as a JPG encoded at quality 0.95. Visually that is very close, but it is a second generation of JPEG compression on top of whatever the camera already applied. Keep your original.

The ICC profile goes too. If your phone shot in Display P3, the colour profile is discarded along with the EXIF, and the re-encoded file is interpreted as sRGB. Saturated reds and greens can shift slightly. On a normal snapshot you will not notice. On a colour-critical print file you will.

The orientation tag is gone. That is usually fine, because the browser applies rotation while decoding, so the canvas receives the image already upright and the result is correctly oriented without needing the tag. It is worth eyeballing the downloaded file anyway.

Transparency becomes white. PNG input stays PNG and keeps its alpha channel. For every other format the canvas is filled with white before the image is drawn, so a transparent WebP will come back with a solid white background.

Files are saved as yourname-clean.jpg or yourname-clean.png. Your original is never modified. Drop two or more photos and a "Strip metadata from all" button appears, which bundles the cleaned copies into metadata-removed.zip.

Reading works on more formats than stripping does

The viewer side accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC and TIFF. The stripping side relies on the browser being able to decode the file into an image element, and most desktop browsers outside Safari cannot decode HEIC or TIFF. If you try, you will get a message suggesting you convert first. Run the file through HEIC to JPG or Image Converter first, then come back.

One quirk of the table: values that come back as structured objects, which includes the parsed date fields, are not printed as rows. So you may see the camera and exposure tags listed without a visible timestamp even though the timestamp is present in the file. The GPS readout is handled separately and always shows when coordinates exist.

If you are resizing or cropping anyway, note that Resize Image and Crop Image also re-encode through canvas, so they drop metadata as a side effect.

Questions people ask

Does removing EXIF change how the photo looks?

Slightly, for non-PNG files. The image is re-encoded as JPEG at quality 0.95 and the ICC colour profile is not carried over, so there is a small amount of extra compression and a possible colour shift if the original used a wide gamut profile such as Display P3.

Why does my photo show no GPS at all?

Either location services were off for the camera, the photo has already been processed by a platform that strips EXIF, or it was screenshotted or re-saved somewhere along the way. Screenshots almost never carry GPS.

Can someone recover the metadata from the cleaned file?

No. The cleaned copy is built from pixel data only, so there is no EXIF block, no embedded thumbnail and no GPS record left to recover. What remains is the visible content of the photo itself, which can still identify a place.

Why will it not strip my HEIC file?

Stripping needs the browser to decode the image, and HEIC decoding is not available in most non-Apple browsers. Reading the metadata still works because that is parsed from the file bytes directly. Convert to JPG first, then strip.

Is anything sent to a server?

No, nothing is uploaded. Everything runs in your browser, so your files never leave your device. The only network request is the one that fetches the parsing library, and the OpenStreetMap link, which you have to click yourself.