How to remove EXIF metadata from a photo

The method that does not degrade the image

There are two ways to strip metadata, and they are not equivalent.

The wrong way is to open the photo in an image editor and export it again. That decodes and re-encodes the picture, which loses quality every single time — do it repeatedly and the damage accumulates visibly.

The right way is container surgery: read the file’s structure, drop the sections that hold metadata, and write the remaining sections back with the compressed image data copied through untouched. The result decodes to exactly the same pixels as the original. You can do it a hundred times and the image never changes.

Doing it here

Open the remove tool, drop in a file, and choose how much to take out. Everything runs in your browser — the file is never uploaded, so there is no copy on a server to worry about.

• Quick clean removes everything identifying — EXIF, GPS, IPTC, XMP, comments, embedded thumbnails and vendor blocks — but keeps the orientation flag and the colour profile so the picture still displays correctly.
• Full clean also removes those two, producing the barest valid file the format allows. A photo taken sideways may then need rotating, and colours can shift slightly in colour-managed software.

Do not forget the thumbnail

EXIF can contain a small JPEG preview of the image. This is worth more attention than it usually gets: if a photo was cropped by software that updated the main image but not the embedded thumbnail, the thumbnail can still show the original, uncropped frame.

There have been real privacy incidents caused by exactly this. Any tool worth using removes the thumbnail; this one removes it when cleaning and also when editing, because keeping one after a change risks leaking the earlier version.

Check that it worked

Plenty of tools tell you a file was cleaned. Far fewer show you. After processing, this one re-reads the finished bytes from scratch, runs the same analysis it ran on the original, and shows the two side by side.

If something survived — because the format does not allow removing it, or because you chose to keep it — that field is listed by name. The success message appears only when the re-analysis actually confirms it.

Questions