See what your photos are telling people

Phone photos carry hidden data: the camera, the date, the software — and often the exact coordinates where the picture was taken. Look at yours, then remove it.

Files never leave your browser

Drop photos here or click to choose — JPG, HEIC from iPhone, PNG and WebP are all read

Why this matters

Almost every photo taken on a phone with location services enabled stores the coordinates where it was taken, accurate to a few metres. That data travels with the file. Post the photo somewhere that does not strip it, and anyone who downloads it can read your home address off a picture of your living room.

Most large social networks do remove this on upload. Messaging apps, email attachments, forums, marketplace listings and file-sharing links very often do not.

How the removal works — and why it costs you nothing

Metadata lives in a separate block alongside the pixels. Almost every tool of this kind removes it the lazy way: it decodes your photo, draws the pixels into a blank image and saves the whole thing again. The metadata goes, but so does a little of the picture, every single time, because JPG throws away detail each time it is written.

That is not necessary. The metadata block can simply be cut out of the file and the compressed picture data left exactly where it is. That is what happens here by default: the file that comes out contains the same encoded pixels as the file that went in, byte for byte, and it is a little smaller because the block is gone. Nothing is lost because nothing is re-saved.

One number is written back, deliberately: the orientation flag. Phone photos are usually stored on their side and stand upright only because that flag tells the reader to rotate them. Strip it along with everything else and the photo lies down in every other program — the single most common complaint about tools like this one. So it is rewritten on its own, in a 32-byte block that contains no location, no camera, no date, and nothing else at all.

HEIC and other formats still have to be re-saved, and the tool tells you which files that happened to.

It is also worth knowing that the other tools on this site already remove metadata as a side effect. Anything you compress, resize, convert or crop here comes out with its metadata gone.

What survives, and what does not

Removed: GPS coordinates, camera make and model, lens, date and time taken, exposure settings, editing software, author and copyright fields, and thumbnails.

Not removed: anything visible in the picture itself. A street sign, a house number, a reflection in a window, or a screenshot showing your username are all still there. Metadata removal is not anonymisation.

Common questions

My photo shows no metadata — is that a problem? No, it usually means the file already passed through something that stripped it, or it is a screenshot. PNG and WebP files can carry EXIF and are read here, but they rarely have any.

Does it read HEIC photos from an iPhone? Yes. The EXIF block inside a HEIC file is found through the file's own item table and read in place, so the GPS coordinates in a photo straight off an iPhone show up here without converting anything first. Cleaning a HEIC does require re-saving it as JPG, because there is no way to rewrite a HEIC container in a browser.

Can I get the original data back afterwards? No. Keep your original file if the date and camera details matter to you.

Can I read a photo with the network switched off? Yes — and on this page in particular it is worth doing once. Load the page, turn off wifi and mobile data, then open a photo and read what is inside it. Everything still appears. Whatever this page can tell you about your picture, it plainly did not need a server to find it, and it had no way to send it anywhere.

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