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EXIF Viewer & Remover

See what your photo says about you — then make it stop.

Every photo from a phone or camera carries a hidden EXIF block: the exact GPS coordinates where it was taken, the device make and model, the moment it was shot down to the second, sometimes even the lens and editing software. Share the original file by email, cloud drive, or forum upload and all of that travels with it — most people never realize a vacation photo can pinpoint their home.

This tool reads that metadata and removes it without your photo ever leaving your device. Both the parser and the stripper run as plain JavaScript in your browser — there is no upload request at all, which is the whole point for a privacy tool. For JPEGs the clean copy is produced by splicing out the metadata segments byte-for-byte, so the image quality is completely untouched.

Drop a photo here, or

JPEG, PNG, WebP up to 32 MB. Everything stays in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

How to use

  1. Drop a photo

    Drag a JPEG, PNG, or WebP onto the dropzone, or click to choose one (up to 32 MB). The file is read locally in your browser — nothing is transmitted.

  2. Review the metadata table

    For JPEGs you get a table of every recognized EXIF tag: camera make and model, timestamps, exposure settings, and — highlighted with a warning — any embedded GPS coordinates shown as decimal latitude and longitude.

  3. Create a clean copy

    Click “Create clean copy”. JPEGs are rebuilt by removing the EXIF, XMP, and comment segments byte-for-byte while keeping the compressed pixel data and the ICC color profile intact. PNG and WebP files are re-encoded through a canvas, which drops metadata by nature.

  4. Verify and download

    The tool re-parses the cleaned file and confirms zero metadata tags remain before you download it as name-clean.ext. Share that copy, keep the original for yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Is my photo uploaded to a server?
No. The EXIF parser and the metadata stripper are plain JavaScript running in your browser tab. There is no upload endpoint and no network request carrying your image — you can verify this in your browser's network inspector. That guarantee is the entire reason this tool exists.
What data do phone photos actually embed?
A typical smartphone JPEG carries GPS latitude, longitude, and altitude accurate to a few meters; the device make and model; the exact date and time of capture; exposure settings (shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length); the lens model; and often the software version that saved the file. Together these can reveal where you live, what device you own, and your daily patterns.
Does stripping metadata reduce image quality?
For JPEGs, no — not even slightly. The cleaner works at the byte level: it copies the file's structural segments and the compressed pixel data verbatim and simply omits the metadata segments. The pixels are never decoded or re-encoded, so the cleaned JPEG is visually and mathematically identical to the original. Only PNG and WebP inputs go through a canvas re-encode, and that is stated in the tool when it happens.
Don't WhatsApp and Instagram already strip EXIF?
Mostly, yes — large social and messaging platforms re-compress uploads and discard metadata in the process. But email attachments, cloud drive shares, many forums, classified-ad sites, and direct file transfers send the original bytes untouched, GPS coordinates and all. If you're sharing a file rather than posting to a big platform, assume the metadata travels with it.
Why does the tool keep the ICC color profile?
The ICC profile describes the color space the image was saved in (such as Display P3 on recent iPhones). Removing it can make colors look washed out or oversaturated in some viewers. It contains no personal information — no location, no device serial, no timestamps — so keeping it preserves color fidelity at zero privacy cost.
Can deleted EXIF data be recovered from the cleaned file?
Not from the cleaned file itself. The metadata segments are not hidden or zeroed — they are simply absent from the output; the bytes are never written. Someone with only the clean copy has nothing to recover. The original file on your device still contains its metadata, of course, so keep or delete that as you see fit.

About

How EXIF is stored inside a JPEG

A JPEG file is a sequence of segments, each announced by a two-byte marker. Metadata lives in APP1 segments near the top of the file, before any pixel data. An EXIF APP1 segment starts with the ASCII signature Exif followed by two null bytes, then embeds a miniature TIFF file: a byte-order mark (II for little-endian, MM for big-endian), then one or more Image File Directories (IFDs). Each IFD is a flat table of 12-byte entries — tag number, data type, count, and a value or an offset to it. IFD0 holds camera-level tags like Make and Model, and two special pointer tags branch to sub-directories: 0x8769 points to the EXIF sub-IFD (exposure settings, original timestamp, lens), and 0x8825 points to the GPS sub-IFD. Because all of this sits in self-contained segments separate from the compressed image data, a cleaner can remove it with a byte-level splice and leave the pixels untouched.

The GPS tag group: from degrees-minutes-seconds to a map point

GPS coordinates in EXIF are not stored as the decimal numbers you see on a map. Latitude and longitude each occupy two tags: a reference letter (N or S for latitude, E or W for longitude) and three rational numbers — pairs of 32-bit integers forming fractions — for degrees, minutes, and seconds. A phone might record latitude as 40/1, 26/1, 4632/100 with reference N, which decodes to 40 degrees, 26 minutes, 46.32 seconds north. Converting to a decimal map coordinate is degrees + minutes/60 + seconds/3600, negated for S or W — here 40.44620. A third tag, GPSAltitude, stores height above sea level as another rational. That is the full pipeline this tool runs to show you the decimal coordinates hiding in your photo — and the exact bytes it removes when you download the clean copy.

Sources & references

Authoritative references behind the math, constants, and tables on this page. Verified by Buğra Sözeri on the dates shown and re-checked at every deploy.