Every photograph your phone takes carries a hidden block of data alongside the picture. At minimum that is the camera model, the lens settings and the exact date and time. On most phones, with location services enabled, it also includes GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres — which means a photo of your living room posted to a forum can carry your home address, and a photo of a child in a garden can carry the address of that garden.
This tool strips all of it. The image is decoded to raw pixels and re-encoded from scratch, so the output file contains the picture and nothing else. There is no metadata block to overlook, because a new file is written rather than the old one edited.
The stripping happens in your browser, which is the only way it makes sense — uploading a photo to have its location removed would transmit that location to the service doing the removing.
| Field | Typical content | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| GPS coordinates | Latitude and longitude to a few metres | Reveals home, school, workplace |
| Date and time | Exact capture timestamp | Places you somewhere at a specific moment |
| Camera and lens | Make, model, serial number | Links separate photos to one device |
| Software | Editing application and version | Reveals your workflow and platform |
| Thumbnail | An embedded preview image | Can still show a pre-crop version of the photo |
| Author fields | Name or copyright string | Identifies you directly |
The embedded thumbnail deserves particular attention. Some editing software updates the main image but leaves the old preview in place, so a photo cropped to hide something can still contain a small version showing it.
Major platforms generally do strip EXIF on upload, and they also re-encode images heavily. But this only covers the path through that platform. Photos sent by email, posted to forums, uploaded to marketplaces, shared through cloud storage links, attached to a support ticket or handed over on a USB stick all keep their metadata intact.
Stripping before you send is the reliable habit, because it does not depend on knowing what each destination does.
Yes. The image is re-encoded from raw pixel data, so no metadata block of any kind survives — GPS coordinates, timestamps, camera identifiers and embedded thumbnails are all gone.
The pixels are unchanged, but the file is re-encoded, which for a JPEG means one additional compression pass at quality 0.92 — not visible under normal viewing.
Most large platforms do, but only for images going through them. Photos sent by email, posted to forums, shared via cloud links or handed over directly keep everything.
Yes. Orientation is read while decoding and applied to the pixels, so the photo stays the right way up even though the EXIF tag is gone.
Right-click the file and open its properties, or use any online EXIF viewer. The camera, date and location fields should all be empty.
No, and that would defeat the purpose. Everything happens inside your browser, so the location data you are removing is never transmitted.