What hides inside your photos
Every photo from a phone or camera carries an invisible payload of metadata: EXIF tags with the device make and model, precise capture timestamps and exposure settings; GPS coordinates accurate to a few meters; IPTC and XMP blocks added by editing software; and often a small embedded thumbnail that can survive crops of the main image. None of it is visible in the picture, and all of it travels with the file when you email it, post it or upload it somewhere that doesn’t sanitize attachments.
How this remover works — and why it catches everything
Instead of parsing and deleting individual tags (and hoping no proprietary ones slip through), this tool redraws your image onto a canvas and exports a brand-new file. Canvas only ever copies pixels, so the output physically cannot contain EXIF, GPS, IPTC, XMP or thumbnail data — there is nowhere for it to hide. The trade-off is honest and worth knowing: PNGs are lossless, so they come out pixel-identical, but JPEGs must go through a second compression pass (quality 0.92). That pass is visually indistinguishable for normal photos, though the file is no longer byte-identical to the original. Anything that isn’t PNG or JPEG is exported as lossless PNG.
Clean, then optimize
- Drop, browse or paste a photo into the panel.
- Click Strip metadata and compare the before/after sizes.
- Download the
clean-copy and share that instead of the original.
Stripped files are often a little smaller already, but if you’re publishing to the web it’s worth running the clean copy through the Image Compressor next, or switching formats entirely with the Image Converter — WebP versions of cleaned photos are frequently half the size.