EXIF viewer & metadata remover
Drop in a photo to see its Exif metadata — camera make and model, exposure settings, the date it was taken, and, if location services were on, its exact GPS coordinates. Then redraw it to a canvas to strip all of that out and download a clean copy. Everything happens in your browser: the photo you load here is never uploaded anywhere.
Drag a photo here, or
JPEG carries the most metadata to read — PNG, WebP and GIF are supported for the cleanup step too.
This photo's metadata includes exact coordinates: . Anyone who checks the file can find this location — clean the file below before sharing it anywhere public.
No location coordinates turned up in this photo's metadata.
Redrawing the photo onto a canvas is what actually removes every metadata tag, including GPS — this happens regardless of which export format you pick below.
How this actually works
The metadata scan is a hand-written reader, not a black box: it walks the JPEG file's own marker structure looking for the segment that starts with the bytes 0xFFE1 — the APP1 marker — whose payload begins with the literal text Exif. Inside that segment is a small self-contained structure (originally borrowed from the TIFF image format) called an Image File Directory: a list of numbered tags, each with a type and a value, such as tag 0x010F for the camera make or tag 0x8825, which points to a second, nested directory just for GPS tags. Reading it is arithmetic on bytes — no image decoding needed for this part at all.
The cleanup step is unrelated to that scan. The picked file is decoded as a normal image and redrawn onto an HTML <canvas> at its original size. A canvas only ever holds pixel colour values — there is nowhere in it to put a metadata block — so exporting the canvas back out as a new file via canvas.toBlob() produces a copy with none of the original metadata, regardless of how much or how little that photo had. This is the same mechanism (a canvas re-encode) that photo-editing software and even a screenshot-and-recrop use, whether or not they mention it.
Why GPS in a photo is a privacy risk
Most phones can tag a photo with the exact GPS coordinates of where it was taken, down to a precision that typically identifies a specific building, not just a neighbourhood. That is invisible in the picture itself — nothing about how a photo looks reveals whether it is carrying a location tag — but the coordinates sit in the file's metadata for anyone to read with the right tool, including this one.
The risk shows up in ordinary situations: a photo of a bike taken in a driveway and posted to a marketplace listing, a "lost pet" flyer photographed in the back yard, a product photo shot on a home desk and uploaded to a storefront. None of these are unusual or careless uses of a camera — the exposure comes from not knowing the file carries a precise address until someone else checks. Stripping the metadata before the photo leaves your device removes that exposure without changing anything about how the photo looks.
Do social platforms and messaging apps strip this already?
Some do, for uploads processed through their own web or app interface, as part of routine image handling. But this protection has real gaps: it is not consistent across every platform or every upload path on the same platform, it typically does not apply to a direct file transfer over email, a messaging app, a USB drive, AirDrop or a cloud-storage share link, and there is generally no visible confirmation either way — the file just gets sent, and whoever receives it can check for themselves. Treating "the platform probably strips it" as a guarantee is exactly the assumption that leads to a location tag reaching someone it was never meant to.
Checking and cleaning a file yourself, before it leaves your device by any route, is the only way to be certain — which is the entire reason this tool exists as a client-side check rather than a server-side one.
Common Exif tags this tool reads
This tool decodes the well-documented, widely used tags — it does not attempt every proprietary "maker note" block that camera manufacturers add on top of the standard, since those are undocumented and vary by brand and even by firmware version.
| Field | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Camera make / model | The manufacturer and model that took the photo | Canon, EOS R6 |
| Date taken | The camera's clock at the moment of capture, not the file's save date | 2024-06-03 14:22:10 |
| Orientation | Which way the sensor was held, so viewers can rotate the image correctly | 6 — Rotated 90° CW |
| Exposure time | Shutter speed, in seconds or a fraction of a second | 1/250s |
| Aperture (f-number) | How wide the lens opening was — lower numbers let in more light | f/2.8 |
| ISO | The sensor's sensitivity setting for that shot | ISO 400 |
| Focal length | The lens's focal length in millimetres for that shot | 50 mm |
| GPS latitude / longitude | The exact location the photo was taken, if location services were enabled | 51.500000° N, 0.116667° W |
Frequently asked questions
Does viewing or cleaning a photo here upload it anywhere?
No. The file's bytes are read locally to scan for metadata, and the image is decoded and redrawn to a canvas inside your own browser tab to produce the cleaned copy. There is no server call at any point — scan, preview and download all happen on your device, and the photo you loaded never leaves it.
What is EXIF data, exactly?
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a block of metadata most cameras and phones embed inside a JPEG file alongside the pixel data. It can include the camera make and model, the lens, exposure settings like shutter speed, aperture and ISO, the date and time the photo was taken, which way up the camera was held, and — if location services were on — the exact GPS coordinates of where the shot was taken.
Why does GPS location in a photo matter for privacy?
A GPS tag in a photo's Exif data is an exact latitude and longitude — often precise enough to identify a specific house, not just a neighbourhood. Photos taken at home and then posted publicly (a marketplace listing, a lost-pet flyer, a social profile) can unintentionally publish that address to anyone who checks the file's metadata, which is trivial to do. Stripping it before sharing removes that risk without changing how the photo looks.
Do social media sites and messaging apps strip GPS data automatically?
Some do, on upload, as part of the platform's own processing — but this is not universal, is not guaranteed to cover every upload path on every platform, and does not help at all for a file you send directly by email, a messaging app, a USB drive, or a cloud-storage share link, since those usually pass the original file through untouched. Checking and cleaning the file yourself before it leaves your device is the only way to be certain.
Does downloading the cleaned image change how the photo looks?
The pixels themselves are unchanged — redrawing to a canvas at the original dimensions does not crop, resize or recolour anything. What can change is file size and, for JPEG or WebP, a small amount of recompression, since both are lossy formats that re-encode the pixel data. Choose PNG if you want an exact, lossless copy with the metadata removed and don't mind a larger file.
Why offer PNG instead of always exporting JPEG?
PNG is lossless, so re-encoding to PNG strips every metadata tag while leaving the pixel data byte-for-byte equivalent to what the canvas decoded — nothing is recompressed. JPEG and WebP are smaller but lossy: re-encoding them applies a fresh round of compression on top of whatever the original file already had, which very slightly changes the pixels even though the visual difference is normally invisible. If file size matters more than an exact pixel match, JPEG or WebP at a high quality setting is still a reasonable choice.
Can this tool read metadata from PNG, WebP or GIF files?
Those formats can technically carry a metadata block, but in practice almost none of the files people actually work with do — Exif data is a JPEG convention created by camera makers, and other formats rarely inherit it. For a PNG, WebP or GIF, this tool reports that plainly rather than pretending to find camera details, and still offers the same canvas re-encode to guarantee the exported copy is clean regardless.
Does removing metadata also remove the photo's orientation, and could that flip it?
Yes — the Exif orientation tag records how a sideways-stored sensor image should be rotated for display, and canvas re-encoding removes that tag along with everything else. Browsers generally honour orientation while decoding the original file, so the redraw should still come out right-side up in the preview; if a downloaded copy ever looks rotated compared to the original, rotate it in your photo app before re-cleaning it here.
Will this tool work on a photo that has already been stripped of metadata?
Yes — it will simply report that no Exif block (or no GPS data) was found, which is common for screenshots, images already re-saved by an editor, or photos downloaded from a service that strips metadata on upload. You can still use the canvas re-encode step to get a fresh, guaranteed-clean copy in a different format if you want one.
Use cases & limitations
Where this is genuinely useful
- Checking a photo for GPS before posting it publicly — a marketplace listing, a rental ad, a lost-pet flyer, a public social profile.
- Confirming exposure settings after a shoot — a quick way to see the shutter speed, aperture, ISO and focal length a photo was taken at, without opening an editor.
- Producing a metadata-free copy to share with someone you don't fully trust with your location — a stranger, a public forum, an unfamiliar service.
- Verifying a claimed capture date, when the Exif date is available and hasn't itself been edited.
What this tool cannot do
- Read proprietary maker-note blocks. Camera manufacturers pack extra, undocumented data into Exif in brand- and firmware-specific formats this tool does not attempt to decode.
- Read or strip IPTC or XMP metadata blocks — separate metadata systems sometimes embedded alongside Exif (captions, keywords, copyright) that this tool's parser does not look for. The canvas re-encode step still removes them, since a canvas holds only pixels regardless of what metadata the source file had.
- Recover a location once you've already shared the original file. This tool only helps before a file leaves your device — it cannot reach back and edit a copy someone else already received.
- Batch-process multiple files at once. It works on one image at a time, with no queue or storage between files.
- Guarantee a byte-identical export. Even the PNG path re-encodes through the browser's own PNG encoder, so exact compression bytes can differ from the source file even though the decoded pixels match.