EXIF Viewer & Remover — See & Strip Photo Metadata (Free)

What is actually inside the file

EXIF is metadata your camera or phone writes into the image automatically. It typically records the make and model, the lens, the exposure settings — shutter speed, aperture, ISO — the focal length, the exact date and time, the orientation, and where location services were on, the GPS coordinates of where you stood.

It travels inside the file rather than beside it, so it survives copying, renaming and emailing. It is invisible to look at and present until something explicitly removes it.

It is genuinely useful, which is why it exists

For a photographer the settings are a record of what produced a particular result. The capture timestamp settles when something happened, which matters for insurance photos, site records and disputes. And the orientation flag is what tells a viewer which way up to display the picture — strip it carelessly and a portrait shot can appear on its side.

So the question is not whether metadata is bad. It is where it survives, and the answer catches people out.

Where it survives, and where it does not

Most large social platforms strip metadata during upload. That is real, and it produces a false generalisation — people conclude that sharing photos is simply safe.

Metadata usually survives where the actual file changes hands:

• Email and messaging attachments, especially anything sent at original quality
• File-hosting and cloud links where the original is stored
• Classified, marketplace and rental listings that take the file directly
• Your own website, if you publish the full-resolution original

Note where the risk sits: not the public post, but the file you sent to one person. A photograph taken at home and attached to a listing carries the coordinates of your home to whoever downloads it — and unlike a social upload, nothing in that path strips them.

Check, strip the copy, keep the original

Stripping is not free. You lose the orientation flag, the capture date and the settings, which is exactly what you want to keep if the file is your archive.

So the rule is to strip the copy you send and keep the original intact. That way the recipient gets a clean file and your own record stays complete.

How the clean copy is made

The tool reads and displays what it finds — make and model, lens, exposure, focal length, date, dimensions, orientation, GPS coordinates, and any additional EXIF, XMP, IPTC or ICC data — and parses all of it in your browser.

The clean copy is produced by re-encoding the image through the browser canvas, which discards every embedded tag as a side-effect. JPEGs are re-encoded at 92% quality; PNGs are lossless, so a cleaned PNG is pixel-identical to the original. The download is named with -clean appended.

The JPEG case is worth being precise about: 92% is visually indistinguishable in almost every case, but it is a second lossy pass, so the cleaned file is not bit-for-bit the original. Another reason to keep the original.

On privacy, stated accurately

The photo is never uploaded — parsing and re-encoding both happen on your device. Like every page on this site, anonymous usage events are recorded so we know which tools get used; those contain no image data and no metadata from your file.

Any re-encode strips metadata as a by-product, which is why the image optimizer also removes it while compressing — useful when you were going to shrink the file anyway.