Remove EXIF data and GPS from a photo

Metadata removal is worth doing because of how specific the data is, not because of how much of it there is. A typical phone photo carries a few dozen tags. Three or four of them matter.

Coordinates

The GPS block stores latitude and longitude as rational numbers, together with reference tags for hemisphere, and frequently altitude and a timestamp. The precision is not approximate. It resolves to a specific address, and on a photo taken indoors that address is usually where the photographer lives, works or was staying.

The block is emptied as a whole rather than filtered tag by tag, and the reason is structural: latitude is stored separately from its north-or-south reference, so a partial cleanup that drops one and keeps the other still leaves a usable coordinate with an ambiguous hemisphere. Anything short of clearing the block is a half-measure.

Device fingerprints

Make and Model name the camera. Where a camera writes them, BodySerialNumber and LensSerialNumber are unique per unit, which means every photo published from that device can be linked to every other one, including photos published anonymously alongside photos published under a name. Neither field is visible in normal use, and both survive cropping, colour correction and most casual editing.

The thumbnail nobody looks at

A JPEG header can carry a small preview copy of the image. Viewers use it to show a fast thumbnail without decoding the full file. On an edited photo, that preview is frequently generated before the edit and never regenerated after it.

The consequence is a real and repeatedly documented failure: a photo cropped to remove something, or edited to obscure something, shipped with a header thumbnail showing the uncropped original. Anyone who opens the header sees what the edit was meant to hide. Removing the thumbnail is not a detail: on an edited photo it is often the single most revealing thing in the file.

What removal does not cover

Being precise about the boundary matters. Stripping a file removes what the file says. It does not remove what a service already knows: the IP address an upload came from, an account identity, a timestamp on the server, or a copy of the original the platform kept. It does not remove information visible in the picture: a street sign, a reflection, a view from a window. And it does not apply retroactively to copies already sent.

Removing metadata is one specific control over one specific channel, and within that channel it is complete. Treating it as general anonymity is the mistake worth avoiding.

Checking that it worked

A privacy tool is worth exactly as much as your ability to verify it, and metadata is one of the few things you can verify completely. Load the cleaned file into the EXIF viewer on this site: an empty result means the header is gone. If you would rather not take one site's word for two of its own tools, any desktop EXIF reader gives the same answer, and on macOS and Linux the command line one — exiftool — prints the whole header in one command.

Verify the first time you use any tool for this, not every time. What you are checking is that the tool does what it claims, and that answer does not change between files.

Formats other than JPEG

EXIF is a JPEG and TIFF structure, which is why this tool can lift it out of a JPEG without touching a pixel. The other formats store metadata differently, and each needs its own answer.

PNG has no EXIF block. It carries text in tEXt and iTXt chunks, and modern encoders write an XMP packet there, which can hold a creator name, an editing history and, occasionally, a location. WebP defines its own EXIF and XMP chunks that most viewers ignore but that travel with the file all the same. HEIC, the default on recent iPhones, holds a complete EXIF item inside its container, alongside depth maps and, on Live Photos, several seconds of video.

This tool re-encodes PNG and WebP as JPEG, which discards everything they were carrying. For HEIC there is nothing it can do in a browser, because no current browser decodes the format, so a HEIC file has to be exported as JPEG on the device first, which is also the moment most of its extra payload is dropped.

Screenshots and downloaded images

Two cases where there is nothing to remove, and knowing that saves a step. A screenshot has no capture metadata: no camera, no lens, no coordinates, because no sensor was involved. An image saved from a web page has usually already been stripped by whatever served it.

What both still carry is the picture. A screenshot showing a notification bar, an open tab, a file path or an account name gives away more than a GPS tag does, and no metadata tool touches any of it. Metadata removal is one control over one channel. Reading the image itself before sending it is the other half, and it is the half that is easy to skip.