View & Remove EXIF Metadata from Photos

Every photo your phone or camera takes contains hidden data alongside the image itself. Most people never see this data, but anyone who receives the file can read it with free tools that take ten seconds to learn. Here is what your typical iPhone or modern Android photo silently reveals about you.

The clearest cases involve sharing photos with strangers or large audiences. Selling something on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or eBay means the buyer downloads your photo. Their EXIF tool reveals where you live. The same applies to dating app photos, which can be saved by anyone who views your profile.

Journalists protecting sources, abuse survivors hiding their location from a stalker, activists in restrictive regions, and witnesses photographing crime scenes all have life-safety reasons to strip metadata before publishing. Even people who do not feel "at risk" benefit: domestic violence support charities recommend it routinely, and the FBI has used EXIF data to track and arrest several criminals who shared photos of stolen items.

For business and professional contexts, EXIF removal matters when sending property photos to clients (real estate, interior designers), uploading product shots to e-commerce (Shopify, Etsy, Amazon), or sharing prototype images with vendors. Anything that goes beyond your immediate circle should have metadata stripped.

For JPEG files, we parse the marker structure of the JPEG format and surgically remove the APP segments that contain metadata: APP1 (EXIF and XMP), APP13 (IPTC), and optionally APP2 (color profile). The compressed image data (DCT coefficients) is copied byte-for-byte to the output. Your photo stays at exactly the same quality as the original.

For PNG, WebP, and other formats, we render the image through an HTML canvas and re-encode. This strips all metadata as a side effect (canvas does not preserve EXIF). For PNG, the re-encoding is lossless. For WebP and other lossy formats, we use 95% quality which is visually identical for almost all use cases.

HEIC files (iPhone photos) are complex and our in-browser parser cannot read all the metadata accurately. The Remove function still works via canvas re-render, but for full visibility of what your HEIC contained, convert it to JPG first and inspect the resulting JPG. Most iPhone photos contain rich metadata including burst sequence IDs, Live Photo references, depth maps, and computational photography tags.