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Strip the metadata out of a photo

Take the GPS, camera and timestamp data out of a JPEG or PNG without re-encoding it. Free, no upload, and the picture itself comes back byte for byte.

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Results appear here. Nothing is uploaded.

    How it works

    Nothing is decoded. A JPEG is walked segment by segment and a PNG chunk by chunk, and the parts that carry personal data — the Exif and XMP block, the Photoshop block that holds captions and credits, free-text comments, the text chunks and the timestamp — are left out of the copy. Everything else is written through unchanged: the quantisation tables, the Huffman tables, the compressed scan itself. Because whole units are dropped, every checksum that remains is still correct and none has to be recomputed.

    What to watch out for

    The rotation tag goes with everything else

    A phone photograph often relies on an orientation tag to be shown the right way up. Removing the metadata removes that too, so a picture that has never been through a viewer which bakes the rotation in can come back on its side. If that happens, the rotate tool on this site applies the turn to the pixels, where no tag is needed.

    A colour profile is metadata by any other name

    The embedded ICC profile lives in an application segment and is taken out with the rest. For a photograph destined for the web that is usually invisible, since browsers assume the standard profile anyway. For a file heading to a printer, or one shot in a wide-gamut space, the colours can shift and the profile is worth keeping.

    It cannot remove what is in the picture

    Metadata is a description attached to the file; the photograph itself is not touched and is not meant to be. A street sign, a reflection, a screen in the background or a face are all still there afterwards. This makes a file stop announcing where it was taken; it does not make the image anonymous.

    Limits

    Files up to about 100 MB work reliably. Beyond that, the ceiling is your device's memory rather than any rule we impose — the work happens on your own machine. Tested in Chrome 140, Firefox 143, Safari 18.

    Why this does not re-encode

    There is an easy way to remove metadata: open the picture, save it again. The new file has none of it, because the encoder writes pixels and nothing else. Every other image tool on this site does exactly that as a side effect.

    It is also lossy. A JPEG decoded and compressed again is not the JPEG that went in, however high the quality setting. Do it a few times and it shows.

    This tool takes the other route. A JPEG is a list of segments and a PNG is a list of chunks; the ones carrying camera data, captions and timestamps are simply not copied. The compressed image data is transferred across untouched, so the file that comes back is the same photograph — same dimensions, same compression, same artefacts — minus the parts that described its author.

    The result panel says so explicitly: it names which blocks were taken out, and reports the pixels as untouched.

    What is being removed

    For a JPEG: the Exif block, which holds camera, lens, exposure, timestamp and GPS coordinates; XMP, which editors use for their own annotations; the Photoshop block, which carries IPTC captions, credits and copyright lines; and any free-text comment.

    For a PNG: the text chunks, the embedded Exif block, and the timestamp.

    The JFIF header is deliberately left in place. It contains no personal information and some older software refuses a JPEG that has none.

    When there is nothing to remove

    Plenty of files arrive already clean, especially anything that has been through a messaging app. In that case the tool says so and hands the original back unchanged rather than writing a new copy for the sake of it.

    The obvious point about privacy

    A tool for removing location data from photographs is a poor place to start uploading photographs. Nothing here is transmitted: the file is read, rewritten and handed back inside this browser tab, on your own machine.

    Your files never leave your browser. Last updated 2026-08-07.