How it works : Photo metadata
Drop a photo in. You are about to see the date, the time down to the second, the camera and, very often, the exact place where you were standing. Then clean it and download the clean copy.
A camera, and above all a phone, writes far more into the file than the picture. The format is called EXIF, and it carries the date and time of the shot down to the second, the make and model of the device, the settings, sometimes a serial number, the software that edited the photo, and if location was switched on, the latitude and longitude of where you were standing.
That information travels with the file. When you send a photo by email or by messaging app, or upload it to a classifieds site, it goes along too. Many social networks strip it on the way, but you cannot count on them, and a direct send strips nothing at all.
This tool does two things. It SHOWS you what your photo says about you, in plain language, without interpreting anything. Then it builds a copy with no metadata at all, which you download.
How it works
- Drop your photo onto the drop area, or choose it, or paste it from the clipboard.
- Read the sheet: everything the file contains appears, grouped by family. Anything that identifies or locates you is highlighted.
- Click “Clean and download”. The clean file downloads, and the original is untouched.
Formats accepted
This tool READS the metadata of these four families of files. It does not claim to read everything: the compatibility matrix says exactly where the limits are, browser by browser.
JPEG photo (.jpg, .jpeg)
The common case: this is the format of phone and camera photos. Full reading, lossless cleaning.
PNG image (.png)
Can carry an EXIF block and text blocks. Lossless reading and cleaning.
WebP image (.webp)
Can carry an EXIF block, an XMP block or a colour profile. Lossless reading and cleaning.
TIFF image (.tif, .tiff)
The metadata can be read everywhere. The PREVIEW of the image, however, only appears in Safari: it is the only browser that can display a TIFF, and we are not going to embed a ten-megabyte decoder for that.
Its limits
50 MB per file
Above that, a phone running out of memory crashes the tab instead of returning a result. The limit is honesty, not a commercial leash.
HEIC photos from iPhones are not read
Only Safari can open a HEIC; elsewhere it would take a decoder of more than ten megabytes. An iPhone can be set to “Most Compatible” to take JPEGs, or share the photo as a JPEG.
Camera raw files (RAW, CR2, NEF, ARW) are not read
Every manufacturer has its own dialect, and no browser decodes them. That is heavy-library territory, ruled out and stated.
Videos are not processed
A video also carries its location and its date, but rewriting one takes a thirty-megabyte engine. That is outside the doctrine, and it is documented on the method page.
Questions about this tool
Is my photo sent anywhere?
No, and you do not have to believe us. Open your browser's inspector with the F12 key, go to the “Network” tab, clear the list, then drop your photo in. Not one line appears. You can also cut your connection: the tool keeps working.
Does the cleaned photo lose quality?
In the vast majority of cases, no: the tool removes the metadata blocks and leaves the pixels untouched, byte for byte. There is one exception, and the tool tells you on screen: if the photo is stored on its side with an orientation tag, removing it would display the image sideways, so the tool turns the pixels upright, which means re-saving the image. You can also choose to keep the orientation tag alone, which says nothing about you, and keep a lossless clean.
Why is there no map to see where the photo was taken?
Because showing a map would mean asking a mapping service for an image, and sending it your coordinates. It would be the only outgoing request on the site, and it would carry the most sensitive piece of information in the file. The coordinates are shown in plain text: you can copy them and paste them wherever you like, knowingly.
Don't social networks already strip metadata?
Most large platforms strip EXIF from the images they republish, but it is neither guaranteed, nor uniform, nor true of the original files you send as attachments, by messaging app, or on a classifieds site. Cleaning before you send is the only gesture that depends on nobody else.
What happens if I drop in a screenshot?
It is treated like any other image. A screenshot usually carries neither a location nor a camera, but it may carry the name of the software that produced it. If the file contains nothing, the tool says so plainly instead of selling you a pointless clean.
What about my iPhone's HEIC photos?
They are not read, and that is written in the tool's limits. Only Safari can open a HEIC; elsewhere it would take a decoder of more than ten megabytes, which we refuse for a site that has to work on a weak connection. In the camera settings, the “Most Compatible” option produces JPEGs.
Drop a photo in. You are about to see the date, the time down to the second, the camera and, very often, the exact place where you were standing. Then clean it and download the clean copy.
VerifyThe proof, step by stepThe network inspector check, explained one gesture at a time, with screenshots.
The cornerThe image cornerA photo says more than it shows. Here you see it, clean it, slim it down, crop it, and blur what is nobody's business.