What does an EXIF remover do?
An EXIF remover deletes the hidden metadata a camera or phone stores inside a photo: the device model, the date and time, and often the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. This tool does it by redrawing the photo's pixels onto a blank canvas in your browser and saving a fresh JPEG that contains no metadata at all.
EXIF, the format camera metadata is stored in, is defined in the CIPA DC-008 specification. Many platforms strip it when you upload, but plenty of routes don't: email attachments, file-sharing links, cloud folders, forums and your own website usually pass the original file on untouched.
How to remove EXIF data
- Click Choose File and pick a photo. Any image format your browser can open is accepted.
- Click Remove.
- Check the preview, then click Download to save
cleaned.jpg.
The original file on your device isn't changed. Share the downloaded copy instead.
How it works
The tool loads your image into the browser, draws it onto a white-filled HTML <canvas> at its full natural size, then exports the canvas with toDataURL('image/jpeg', 0.95). A canvas only ever holds decoded pixels. It has no access to the original file's bytes, so there's nothing for the export to carry over. Rather than searching for metadata and deleting it field by field, the cleaned file simply starts empty.
That approach covers more than EXIF:
| Data in the original | In the cleaned copy? |
|---|---|
| Camera make, model, lens, serial number | Removed |
| GPS latitude, longitude, altitude | Removed |
| Date taken and date modified | Removed |
| Exposure settings and maker notes | Removed |
| XMP and IPTC data (captions, keywords, editing history) | Removed |
| Embedded thumbnail (which can show a pre-crop version) | Removed |
| Embedded color profile (ICC) | Not copied |
| The visible image and its pixel dimensions | Kept |
Things to know before you share
The output is always JPEG. Whatever you put in, you get a JPEG named cleaned.jpg. JPEG has no transparency. Left alone, the HTML standard has the browser composite such an export onto opaque black, so the tool fills the canvas with white before drawing your image. Transparent parts of a PNG or WebP therefore come out white. Use this tool for photos, not logos or graphics that need to keep a transparent background.
It's a re-encode, not a lossless edit. Quality 0.95 is near the top of the scale, so differences are rarely visible, but the file is compressed again. The file size can go up or down compared with the original, depending on how heavily the original was compressed.
Only the first frame of an animation is kept. An animated GIF or WebP becomes a single still JPEG.
Location can also be in the picture itself. Removing metadata doesn't hide a street sign, a house number or a recognizable landmark in the frame. Check the image as well as the file.
Worked example
Say you've taken a 4032 × 3024 landscape photo on a phone with location services on, and you want to post it on a forum that doesn't strip metadata.
- Run the original through the EXIF viewer: it shows the phone's make and model, Orientation 1, the capture date and exposure settings, and
GPSLatitude/GPSLongitudelines with the coordinates where you stood. - Run it through this tool and download
cleaned.jpg. - Run
cleaned.jpgthrough the EXIF viewer again: it now reports no EXIF metadata. The image is still 4032 × 3024 pixels.
Step 3 is the useful check: no EXIF block means no GPS data either.
Related tools
Several other image tools on this site also re-encode through a canvas and so drop metadata as a side effect. The image compressor does it while also letting you choose a lower JPEG quality for a smaller file, and the image resizer does it while scaling the photo down, which is worth doing anyway for a 12-megapixel phone shot you're posting online. If you want to label a photo as yours, the watermark tool adds a text mark.
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