EXIF Metadata Viewer & Stripper
See exactly what's hiding in a photo — camera model, timestamp, software, and exact GPS location — then strip it all before you share the image.
Interactive Client Prototype Sandbox
Drop photos here, or click to choose files
JPEG shows full metadata (camera, date, GPS); other formats are cleaned without a metadata preview
Reading and cleaning both happen locally in your browser — photos are never uploaded. Cleaning redraws the image onto a canvas and re-exports it, which only ever carries pixel data, so EXIF, GPS, and any other embedded metadata segments do not survive the round trip.
Disclaimer: This free tool is provided “as is,” without warranties of any kind, and is for general informational purposes only — not professional, legal, financial, medical, tax, or engineering advice. Results may contain errors; verify anything important independently and use at your own risk. We accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from its use. See our Terms of Use for details.
Step-by-Step Guide
Drop one or more photos onto the panel, or click to choose files. JPEGs are scanned immediately and any EXIF fields found — camera, date, software, exposure settings, and GPS location — are listed under the filename. A red badge with the exact coordinates appears if a photo contains GPS data.
Click 'Strip metadata' to clean every loaded photo: each one is redrawn onto an in-memory canvas and re-exported, which only ever encodes pixel data — none of the original file's metadata segments make it into the output. Once done, download the cleaned version individually or use 'Download all'.
Why redrawing works
A canvas element has no concept of EXIF, XMP, or ICC profile data — it only stores a grid of pixel colors. When your browser decodes the original photo to draw it, and then re-encodes the canvas back into a JPEG or PNG, the new file is built from scratch with only the pixels that were drawn. This is a reliable way to strip metadata precisely because the browser's canvas API was never designed to preserve it in the first place.
What this does and doesn't check
EXIF is a JPEG/TIFF concept — PNG and WebP files rarely carry the same rich metadata, so those formats usually show no fields even though they can occasionally carry some embedded data (which cleaning still removes). This tool also can't inspect formats the browser itself can't decode, such as HEIC photos straight off an iPhone; convert those to JPEG first using your phone's share/export options, then clean the JPEG here.
A photo taken on an iPhone shows: Apple iPhone 14 Pro · 2024:03:15 14:22:07 · 1/240s · f/1.78 · ISO 64 · GPS 40.71280, -74.00600. After stripping, the cleaned file shows 0 metadata fields and the same coordinates are no longer present anywhere in the downloaded image.
Who it's for
Anyone posting photos publicly (marketplace listings, social media, forums), journalists and activists protecting sources, and privacy-conscious users who don't want to broadcast where a photo was taken.
Core Features
- Reads and displays the real EXIF fields found in a JPEG: camera make/model, capture date, software, exposure settings, and GPS coordinates.
- Flags images with embedded GPS location with a clear warning before you share them.
- Strips all metadata by redrawing the image through canvas — pixel data only survives the round trip, nothing else does.
- Batch upload and batch download for cleaning multiple photos at once.
- Runs entirely in your browser — photos are never uploaded anywhere, which matters most for exactly the images you're trying to protect.
🛡️ No tracking — your inputs, keys, and details never leave this client sandbox.
Related tools
Does stripping metadata reduce image quality?
Stripping alone doesn't intentionally reduce quality — the tool re-encodes at high quality (95% for JPEG) since the goal here is privacy, not compression. That said, JPEG is a lossy format, so any re-encoding is technically a fresh compression pass; at 95% quality the difference is not visually detectable in normal use. PNG and WebP re-encoding is effectively lossless or near-lossless the same way.
Is my photo uploaded anywhere to check for metadata?
No. The file is read and parsed directly in your browser using the File and Canvas APIs — this matters specifically because the sensitive part (GPS coordinates, in particular) is exactly the kind of data you don't want touching a third-party server, even briefly, while it gets 'checked'.
What is GPS EXIF data and why does my phone add it?
Most smartphones embed the exact latitude and longitude where a photo was taken directly into the file's EXIF metadata, usually because location services are enabled for the camera app. It's genuinely useful for organizing your own photo library by place, but it also means anyone who receives the original file — not a screenshot, the actual file — can see precisely where you were standing when you took it.
Why does a screenshot or a downloaded image show no metadata?
Screenshots are generated fresh by the OS and typically carry no camera EXIF data (there's no camera involved). Many platforms — messaging apps, social media, some cloud services — also strip EXIF automatically on upload as a side effect of re-processing the image, which is a privacy positive but not something to rely on for photos you send directly, like email attachments or files shared via a link.
Can I see the metadata without removing it?
Yes — the metadata fields are displayed as soon as a photo finishes loading, before you click 'Strip metadata'. You can review exactly what's embedded and decide whether to clean the file at all; nothing is modified until you explicitly click the strip button.
What EXIF actually is
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a metadata standard built into the JPEG and TIFF specifications, designed originally so cameras could record technical shooting details — shutter speed, aperture, ISO, lens — alongside the image itself. Over time, as cameras and phones gained GPS receivers, the same mechanism absorbed location data: a photo's EXIF block can carry the exact latitude and longitude, sometimes accurate to a few meters, of where it was taken. This data rides invisibly inside the file; opening the photo in a normal image viewer shows none of it, which is exactly why so many people don't realize it's there.
Why this became a privacy problem
EXIF GPS data has caused real, documented harm: stalkers locating victims from photos posted to dating profiles or social media, domestic abuse survivors being tracked down through photos shared from a 'safe' new address, and public figures having home addresses inferred from casually posted pictures. The core issue is a mismatch between intent and mechanism — someone shares a photo intending to show an image, not a location, but the file format bundles both together by default. High-profile incidents (including cases involving public figures whose location was deduced from EXIF data in posted photos) have made this a well-known category of accidental self-doxxing.
What platforms do and don't handle for you
Many major platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and most messaging apps — strip EXIF metadata automatically when you upload a photo through their normal upload flow, as a side effect of re-compressing and re-processing every image for their own storage and delivery pipeline. This creates a false sense of security: people assume metadata stripping is universal, but it is not guaranteed for direct file transfers — email attachments, cloud storage links, files sent via USB or AirDrop, or upload paths on smaller platforms that don't re-process images the same way. The only reliable guarantee is to check and strip the metadata yourself before sending the file anywhere.
The redraw technique
The simplest robust way to strip image metadata without a specialized library is to decode the image and re-encode it through a raster surface that has no concept of metadata at all — which is exactly what an HTML canvas is. Drawing the decoded image onto a canvas and calling toBlob() to re-export produces a new file built purely from pixel values; there is no code path by which the canvas API could carry EXIF, XMP, or ICC profile data through to the output, because it was never designed to store any of that in the first place. This makes canvas-based re-encoding a genuinely reliable stripping method, not just a heuristic one.