How to check and clean a photo
- Add the photoDrop it on the page, press Choose photos, or paste an image you copied. Several at once is fine; each gets its own card.
- Read the location box firstA tinted box headed “This photo reveals where it was taken”, with two numbers under it, means the file records the spot. “No location data” means it does not. If a card says some metadata couldn’t be fully read, treat the location as unknown; the clean copy drops those blocks anyway.
- Look through the detailsCamera, lens, time taken and the editing software are listed on the card. Open Show all fields to see every tag the file carries, including serial numbers.
- Save the clean copyPress Remove metadata. You get a new file named with -clean added, and the card shows its size next to the original’s. Share that one instead.
What a photo file usually records
Cameras and phones write a block of text and numbers into every picture, most often in the EXIF format. Photo editors add their own XMP block, and news or stock workflows add IPTC captions and credits. None of it shows on screen, yet anyone who has the file can read it with a tool like this one.
| Field | Example | What it gives away |
|---|---|---|
| GPS latitude and longitude | 12.345667, −98.765431 | The spot where you stood, often your home, school or workplace |
| Date and time taken | 2026-05-17 14:03:22, UTC+02:00 | When you were there, and with the offset, which time zone you were in |
| Camera make and model | The phone or camera model name | What device you own, which narrows down who took the picture |
| Body and lens serial numbers | A string of digits unique to one camera | A fingerprint linking every photo from that camera, across accounts and years |
| Software | Editor name and version, or phone system version | That the picture was edited, and with what |
| Owner, artist, copyright | A full name typed into the camera settings once | Your name, on every picture since that day |
| Embedded thumbnail | A small preview picture inside the file | Sometimes the uncropped original, after the main picture was cropped |
Exposure settings such as shutter speed, aperture and ISO are harmless on their own, which is why photographers like to keep them. The table lists the fields that matter for privacy; the Show all fields list on each card has everything else.
How precise is the location?
According to the US government’s GPS information site, GPS in a smartphone is typically accurate to within 4.9 metres under open sky, and less accurate near tall buildings, bridges and trees. Phones also use Wi-Fi and mobile network positions, which work indoors. In practice a location tag usually lands on the right building, and often on the right side of it.
The file itself stores far more precision than the fix is worth. EXIF saves degrees, minutes and seconds as fractions; converted to decimal degrees, the fourth decimal place is about 11 metres of latitude and the fifth about 1.1 metres, because one degree of latitude is roughly 111 kilometres. This tool shows six decimals so you see the value exactly as stored, not because the phone knew it that precisely. Some files also record altitude, the compass direction the camera faced and a GPS timestamp in UTC.
Does sharing a photo remove the metadata?
It depends on how the file travels, and you rarely get told. Anything that hands over the original file keeps everything: an email attachment, a cloud-storage link, a chat app’s option to send a photo as a file or document, or copying it to a USB stick. The recipient gets the same bytes you have, location included.
Services that resize or recompress pictures before showing them to others usually drop most of these fields along the way, because a newly encoded file starts without them. That is the service’s choice, not a guarantee: it can change, it can differ between the displayed copy and the one kept on its servers, and the service itself still received your original. Some phones also offer a switch in the share sheet to leave out the location for one share. If you are not sure which case applies, clean the file first; it costs a few seconds. The guide on what photo metadata reveals has a short checklist for sharing.
Lossless removal versus re-saving
There are two ways to get rid of metadata. The first, which this tool uses, walks through the file’s structure and copies every block except the metadata ones. For a JPEG those blocks are called segments: the quantisation and Huffman tables, the frame header and the compressed scan data are copied byte for byte, while the EXIF and XMP segments, IPTC captions, comments and other application blocks are skipped, including any tucked between the scans of a progressive JPEG. The JFIF header is kept but rebuilt without the small thumbnail it is allowed to carry. For a PNG, the text, eXIf and tIME chunks are dropped and every other chunk is kept with its original checksum. For a WebP, the EXIF and XMP chunks go, and the header flags and file length are corrected to match.
The second way is to decode the picture to pixels and encode it again, which is what an image compressor or a screenshot does. The new file starts empty, so the metadata disappears as a side effect, but a JPEG or lossy WebP also loses a little detail each time it is re-encoded. Lossless removal leaves the picture untouched, so you can clean a photo as many times as you like. Any data stored after the end of a JPEG image is dropped as well; phones sometimes append a second, smaller picture there, such as a preview or a depth map.
Why the rotation tag stays
Many phones and cameras save every picture in the sensor’s landscape orientation and write a single EXIF value, Orientation, that tells viewers to turn it when displayed. A portrait photo is therefore stored lying on its side with a note saying rotate 90 degrees. Remove that note and the photo opens sideways in most programs.
So when a JPEG’s orientation is anything other than normal, the clean copy gets a new, minimal EXIF block of 36 bytes holding only that one value. It says nothing about you. If the photo was already upright, no EXIF block is written at all. For PNG and WebP files, where a rotation tag is rare, the tag is removed along with the rest and the card warns you when that happens.
What this can’t remove
- What is in the picture. Street signs, house numbers, a view from a window, a reflection in glasses or a parcel label can reveal as much as GPS. Crop or blur those before sharing.
- The file name. Phones often name files after the date and time, and people rename them with places or full names. The clean copy keeps your file name with -clean added, so rename it if the name says too much.
- Screenshots and edited images. A screenshot contains none of the original photo’s tags, but it carries its own: the screen size, sometimes the device and software, and the time it was taken. Editing apps can also add their own fields. Run those through this tool too.
- Other formats. HEIC, AVIF, GIF, TIFF and raw camera files are not read here. Convert them to JPEG, PNG or WebP first and check the result, because conversion often copies the metadata across.
Questions
Does removing metadata lower the image quality?
No. The compressed picture data is copied into the clean file exactly as it was, so every pixel decodes to the same value as before. Only the blocks that describe the photo are left out, which is why the clean copy is usually just a few kilobytes smaller.
Why does my cleaned JPEG still contain an EXIF block?
If the camera marked the photo as turned sideways or upside down, the clean copy gets a tiny EXIF block holding that one rotation value and nothing else: no date, no camera, no location. Without it, a portrait photo would open lying on its side.
How do I see the location on a map?
Copy the two numbers from the location box, latitude first, and paste them into the search field of any map app or website. Negative latitude means south of the equator; negative longitude means west of Greenwich.
Why is my HEIC photo refused?
Most browsers cannot decode HEIC, the space-saving format many phones use by default, so the file cannot be shown or checked here. Share or save the photo as a JPEG first; the JPEG usually keeps the same location and camera details, so it is worth checking too.
Does the clean file get a new date on my computer?
Yes, but that date lives in your file system, not inside the image. When you save the clean copy, your computer records when it was saved. That date travels with the file only on some kinds of transfer, and it no longer says when the photo was taken.
Can I clean several photos at once?
Yes. Add as many as you like; each gets its own card with its own Remove metadata button, and the Keep color profile switch applies to all of them. Photos stay in this tab’s memory until you remove them, press Clear or close the page.