What a photo can reveal about you
A photo taken on a phone records more than the picture. Alongside the pixels it stores the exact capture time, the phone model and often its software version, camera settings, and on most phones the GPS coordinates of the place where you stood, accurate to a few metres. Editing apps may add their own name, a history of edits and sometimes the author's name from the program's settings.
Whether this matters depends on where the file goes. Big social networks and messengers usually strip it on upload. Many other routes do not:
- Email attachments and cloud-drive share links deliver the original file untouched.
- Marketplace listings, forums and personal websites often publish what you upload as is.
- Photos sent "as file" or "as document" in messengers skip the app's own compression and keep everything.
A listing photo of a sofa taken in your living room can therefore carry your home address. Checking takes seconds in the EXIF viewer; removing it takes seconds here.
How the removal works
Image formats keep metadata in separate, labelled sections of the file, apart from the compressed picture data. This tool reads the file's structure, skips the sections that hold metadata, and copies every other byte exactly as it was. Nothing is decoded or re-encoded.
- JPEG: the APP1 segments that hold EXIF and XMP, and the APP13 segment that holds IPTC captions, keywords and copyright fields, are removed. Everything from the start of the image data onward is copied unchanged.
- PNG: the eXIf chunk and all text chunks (tEXt, zTXt, iTXt) are removed. XMP in a PNG lives in an iTXt chunk, so it goes too.
- WebP: the EXIF and XMP chunks are removed, the extended header's flags announcing them are cleared, and the file's size header is corrected.
Because the image data is untouched, the result is pixel-for-pixel identical to the original, and the file only gets smaller by the size of the removed sections, typically from a few kilobytes to a few dozen for a phone JPEG with an embedded preview thumbnail. Dropping a whole folder is fine: files are cleaned one by one and the batch downloads as a single ZIP with the original filenames.
What stays in the file
Some sections are kept because they are needed to display the image correctly or carry no personal information:
- The colour profile (ICC), so wide-gamut photos keep their colours.
- Basic format headers such as JFIF density in JPEG, and dimension and gamma information in PNG.
- A rarely used JPEG comment segment and PNG's last-modified timestamp, if present.
The counter on each file reports how many EXIF, TIFF and GPS tags were found in the original. It gives a sense of how much was there; a count of zero simply means the file had no EXIF to begin with.
Sideways photos after cleaning
Phones often store the pixels in the sensor's native landscape layout and add an Orientation tag that tells viewers to rotate the image upright. That tag lives in the EXIF block, so once the block is gone, some viewers show the photo lying on its side.
If that happens, there are two easy fixes:
- Run the original through compress JPG at 90 to 95. The photo is drawn upright before saving, and metadata is not carried into the new file, so you get both results at once at the cost of one light re-encode.
- Or rotate the cleaned copy with rotate image so the pixels themselves are upright.
Photos taken in landscape with the phone held normally usually need neither.
Good habits for sharing photos
- Turn off location tagging in your camera app if you rarely need it. On most phones it is a single switch in the camera or privacy settings, and it prevents the problem at the source.
- Clean before you send, not after. Once a file with GPS data has been posted or emailed, removing it from your copy does not change the copy others received.
- Verify the result. Drop the cleaned file into the EXIF viewer; it should report no metadata.
- Remember the picture itself. Metadata is only half the story: house numbers, car plates, documents on a desk and window views can identify a location just as well.
HEIC photos are not accepted here directly; converting them to JPG produces a copy without the original metadata. All processing happens in your browser and the files never leave your device.