Remove Metadata from Photo

Add your pictures to the box above and the tool reads each one at once. Before you change anything, you see what the file says about itself: the GPS position with a link to a map, the altitude, the camera make and model, serial numbers, the lens, the date and time it was taken, the time zone, the software that saved it, the author or artist, copyright, description and comments, and blocks such as XMP, IPTC, maker data and a hidden preview thumbnail. Items that can point to you or to a place are shown in red, and the list header counts how many pictures have a GPS location.

Then press Remove metadata. JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF files are cleaned by cutting out the hidden blocks while the image data itself is copied byte for byte, so there is no quality loss at all. HEIC, AVIF, TIFF and BMP files cannot be cleaned that way in a browser, so they are saved again as JPG or PNG at 95% quality, which also drops every hidden detail. You download one photo directly or all of them in a single ZIP.

This is the simplest way to remove metadata from photo online free: no account, no watermark, and no upload. Your pictures are read and cleaned on your own device, and nothing is sent to our servers. You can add up to 500 photos at a time, each up to 200 MB.

Metadata is information stored inside an image file next to the picture itself. You do not see it when you look at the photo, but every program that opens the file can read it. Cameras and phones write it automatically at the moment you press the shutter, and editing programs add more each time they save.

The most common kind is EXIF, a block of tags that a camera fills with technical and personal facts: when the photo was taken, with which device, with which settings and, if location services were on, exactly where. Next to it there can be XMP, a text block that editing software uses for keywords, ratings and editing history, and IPTC, a set of fields used by news agencies and photographers for captions, credits and copyright notes.

Most of this is harmless or even useful in your own photo library. It lets you sort pictures by date, find all shots from one trip on a map or check which lens you used. The problem starts when the file leaves your hands. A picture posted on a forum, sent to a buyer or attached to an email carries the same details to everyone who receives it, and many people do not know that they are there.

The camera or phone writes the first and largest part. At the moment the picture is taken it records the device, the lens, the exposure settings, the date and time with the time zone and, when location is allowed, the GPS position, altitude and the direction the camera was facing. Some devices add the owner name that was typed in during setup, a unique image ID and serial numbers of the body and the lens.

Editing programs add the second part. They write their own name and version, the date of the last save, and often an XMP block with the steps of the edit, keywords, ratings and, in some cases, the path of the original file on your disk. Photo library apps can copy names of people they recognised, album titles and places into the same block.

The third part comes from people. Photographers fill in author, copyright and caption fields, agencies add credits and contact details, and some cameras let you set a comment that is stamped into every picture. All of it travels with the file until somebody removes it.

Phones store the location of a photo when location services are allowed for the camera, which is the default on many devices. The position is precise to a few metres. A photo of your new sofa taken in the living room, a picture of a bike you want to sell or a snapshot of your child in the garden can therefore reveal your home address to anyone who downloads the file.

The tool shows the position as latitude and longitude and offers a link to see where this photo was taken on a map, so you can check for yourself what a stranger would find. The altitude is shown as well when it is present. The counter at the top of the list tells you how many of your pictures have a GPS location, so a batch with one risky photo among fifty does not slip through.

If you only want to hide where a picture was taken, choose Location only. It wipes the GPS part and keeps the camera, the date and the other details, which is handy for photos that you share with a club or a family archive where the date still matters.

Many cameras and phones store a small preview of the photo inside the EXIF block, so that galleries can show a thumbnail without reading the whole picture. Some editing programs do not update this preview when you crop or retouch the picture.

The result can be surprising: a photo cropped to show only a product may still carry a small copy of the full original scene, with the room, the window view or the person who was cut out. Anyone who opens the file with a metadata reader can extract that preview.

The tool lists an embedded preview as a red item and removes it together with the rest of the EXIF block, so the clean copy shows only what you see in the picture itself.

Better cameras record the serial number of the body and often of the lens. On its own that number says little, but it is the same in every picture the camera takes. If you once posted a photo under your real name and later post another under a nickname, the serial number can tie the two together.

Maker data is a further block in which manufacturers keep their own notes: focus points, internal temperatures, shutter counts and, on some models, serial numbers again. Its layout is often not public, so many readers show it only as a block of a certain size. The tool lists it as maker data and removes it, because you cannot easily check what is inside.

XMP is a block of text that editing and library programs use to store information about a picture: keywords, star ratings, the names of people tagged in it, the editing steps and sometimes the location again, copied from the EXIF block. Because it is plain text, it can hold almost anything, and it is often much larger than the EXIF block.

IPTC is an older set of fields used by news agencies and photographers: headline, caption, author, credit line, city and country, contact details and usage terms. It is useful for professional work, but a picture sent to a private person or posted publicly rarely needs it.

With All metadata selected, both blocks are removed completely. Location only leaves them in place, so if you know that an editing program has copied a location into XMP, use All metadata to be sure.

Many tools that remove EXIF data simply open the picture, draw it again and save a new file. That works, but every new save of a JPG loses a little detail, and the file size changes in ways you cannot control. This tool takes a different route for the common formats. It walks through the file block by block, drops the blocks that hold metadata and copies the compressed image data exactly as it was.

For JPG that means the EXIF block, XMP, IPTC, comments and maker data are removed, while the JFIF header, the Adobe colour block and the compressed picture stay untouched. For PNG the text chunks, the EXIF chunk and the last-saved time are dropped. For WebP the EXIF and XMP chunks are removed and the header flags are corrected. For GIF the comment blocks and application data are removed, while the animation loop setting is kept.

The result is the same picture, pixel for pixel, usually a little smaller because the hidden blocks are gone. When you remove EXIF data this way you can do it as often as you like without any loss, and the result line confirms it with no quality loss next to each file.

A camera stores every photo with its sensor the same way round and writes a small orientation tag that tells viewers to turn the picture when it was taken in portrait or upside down. Tools that throw away the whole EXIF block also throw away that tag, and the clean photo suddenly lies on its side.

This tool avoids that. When the original has an orientation other than normal, the cleaned JPG gets a tiny new EXIF block that holds only the orientation tag and nothing else. It says nothing about you, the camera or the place, but it keeps the photo standing the right way in every viewer.

A colour profile, also called an ICC profile, describes how the colours in the file are meant to look. Photos from newer phones and from cameras set to a wide colour space look dull or too saturated without it. The profile holds no personal data: no name, no place, no date of the photo.

That is why Keep the colour profile is switched on by default under More options. Turn it off only if you need the smallest possible file and your pictures use ordinary sRGB colours, or if a strict policy asks for every optional block to be removed.

Most services that remove EXIF data from image online want you to upload the picture first. The photo then sits on someone else's server, at least for a while, which is an odd way to protect your privacy. Here the whole job runs in JavaScript inside your browser. The file is read from your disk, cleaned in memory and handed back to you as a download.

You can check this yourself: load the page, switch off your internet connection, and add a photo. Reading and cleaning still work, because nothing needs to travel. That also makes it fast, as there is no upload or download time, even for a batch of large camera files.

So if you need to remove EXIF data from image online without sending it anywhere, this page does exactly that. It works the same in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, on computers, tablets and phones.

There are two ways to remove metadata from photo iPhone pictures. The first is built in: in the share sheet, tap Options at the top and turn off Location before sending. That removes the GPS position for that one share, but the camera, the date and other details stay in the file.

The second way removes everything. Open this page in Safari, tap Select photos and choose pictures from your library. They are cleaned on the phone and saved back as files that you can share or store. Before an upload to a website or a marketplace, this is the quicker route for a whole batch.

To stop new photos from carrying a location at all, go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Location Services, then Camera, and choose Never. Photos already taken keep their position until you clean them.

Photos taken on an iPhone are usually HEIC files. When you add them from the photo library in Safari, the phone often converts them to JPG on the way and keeps the metadata, so the tool sees and cleans them as JPG without any loss. When you add the original HEIC file, for example from the Files app or after copying it to a computer, the tool saves it again as JPG or PNG, which drops every tag.

So to remove EXIF data from iPhone photo files, add them in any of these ways; the result is always clean. If you mostly need HEIC files as JPG for other reasons, HEIC to JPG converts them with more choices of size and quality.

To remove EXIF data from iPhone photo shots that will be printed or archived, PNG is the lossless choice for the saved copy, at the cost of a much larger file. JPG at 95% looks the same to the eye and stays small.

To remove metadata from photo Android pictures, open this page in Chrome or any other browser on the phone, tap Select photos and pick pictures from the gallery or the file manager. They are cleaned on the phone, and you save them to the Downloads folder or share them from there.

Some Android galleries also offer a remove location data switch when you share a photo, and most camera apps have a setting to stop saving the location in the first place. Like on the iPhone, that only covers the GPS part; the device model, the date and any author set in the camera stay in the file.

For a marketplace listing, check that the browser gives you the original file and not a reduced copy. Choosing pictures through the file manager instead of the gallery usually gives the full-size original.

Windows has a built-in option: right-click a photo, choose Properties, open the Details tab and click Remove Properties and Personal Information. It can create a copy with all possible properties removed. It works on one folder at a time, does not show you a map of the location, and does not cover every block that a camera or editor can write.

To remove metadata from photo Windows 11 users can also just open this page in Edge, Chrome or Firefox, drop the whole folder of pictures on the box and download the clean ZIP. You see the location and the other details before cleaning, and every file is checked again afterwards.

To use the File Explorer route for a batch instead, select the pictures, open Properties, and choose the option to create a copy. Check the result with this page or with Metadata Viewer, because some blocks such as XMP may survive.

On a Mac, the Photos app can hide the location of a picture: select it, open Image in the menu bar, then Location and Hide Location. Exporting with Remove Location Information ticked leaves out the GPS position. Preview can show the GPS part in the Inspector and remove it from there.

Those options focus on location. To remove metadata from photo Mac files completely, open this page in Safari, Chrome or Firefox, drag the pictures from Finder onto the box and download the clean copies. Camera serial numbers, author fields, comments and the hidden preview are removed as well.

If you clean Mac libraries often, export the pictures from Photos as unmodified originals first, clean them here, and keep the cleaned copies in a separate folder for sharing.

Large social networks and messaging apps often strip metadata themselves when you post or send a picture in the normal way, because they shrink and save the image again. That is good, but it is not a rule you can rely on. Their behaviour changes, it differs between the app and the website, and it is not always documented.

The important exception is sending a photo as a file or as a document. Many messengers offer that option to keep the full quality, and in that case the original file, with every tag in it, reaches the other person. The same goes for email attachments, cloud links, file transfer services, forums that keep the original upload and your own website.

If you are not sure, clean the picture first. It takes a few seconds, the quality stays the same, and you no longer depend on what the next service does with your file.

PNG files have no camera tags in most cases, but they often carry text chunks. Screenshot tools, design programs and image generators write the software name, the author, a description, a creation time or the full settings that were used to make the picture. Some files also contain an EXIF chunk copied from a photo. The tool lists every text chunk with its key and value, and marks those that look personal in red.

WebP files can hold EXIF and XMP chunks just like JPG, often copied over when a photo was converted. GIF files can contain comment blocks and application data from the program that made them. In all three formats the tool removes these parts and keeps the picture data, so the quality and, for GIF, the animation stay the same.

Add up to 500 pictures in one go, by selecting them together, dropping a folder's worth of files or adding more with Add more. Each picture gets its own row with a small preview, the number of details found and a warning when a location is present. Click a name to open the full list for that file.

After cleaning, Download all saves one ZIP file with all clean photos. The names stay the same unless you tick Add -clean to the names under More options, and if two pictures have the same name a number is added so nothing is overwritten. With a single photo the button saves it directly without a ZIP.

Large batches run one photo after another so the page stays responsive. Even a few hundred camera files usually take well under a minute on a computer, because no picture has to be redrawn unless it is HEIC, AVIF, TIFF or BMP.

After cleaning, every new file is read again with the same reader that found the details at the start. The result line for each photo shows the size before and after, how many personal details are left and whether the file was cleaned with no quality loss or saved again. For a correct result the count is 0 personal details.

For a second opinion, open a cleaned file in Metadata Viewer, or simply add it to this page again: a clean picture shows clean in green. On a computer you can also look at the file properties, which should show no camera, date taken or location any more.

There are many everyday moments when it is wise to delete metadata from picture files. Selling a phone, a car or furniture online with photos taken at home. Sending pictures of a flat to a landlord or a buyer. Posting on a forum under a nickname. Sharing photos of children. Handing in images for a competition or a job where your name should not appear yet.

Professionals delete metadata from picture files as well: journalists protecting sources, photographers sending previews before a contract, designers removing the names of tools and earlier versions, and companies publishing product shots without internal file paths or staff names. In all these cases, a clean copy says nothing more than the picture itself.

To delete metadata from picture files in bulk, add them all, keep All metadata selected and download the ZIP. Your originals on the disk are not changed, so you still have the full details for your own archive.

Removing metadata is not always the right choice. In your own archive the date, the place and the camera help you find and sort pictures years later, and photo library apps rely on them. Keep your originals as they are and clean only the copies you share.

Photographers who sell or license their work often want the author and copyright fields to stay, so that the picture can be traced back to them. In that case a visible mark with Watermark Image is a better way to protect the work, and the clean copy can still go to the client without serial numbers or the location.

Scientific, legal and insurance pictures sometimes must keep their original details as proof of when and where they were taken. Ask before you clean such files, and keep an untouched copy in any case.

When you add a picture, the browser reads the file into memory and the tool looks at its structure. A JPG is a series of segments, each with a marker and a length; a PNG is a series of chunks; a WebP is a container of chunks; a GIF is a series of blocks. The tool walks through these parts, reads the tags it knows and shows them in the list.

Cleaning works on the same structure. The parts that hold metadata are left out, the parts that hold the picture are copied unchanged, and the result is put together as a new file. For JPG a new, tiny block with only the orientation tag is added when the photo needs it. For WebP the size field and the flags in the header are corrected so viewers read the file correctly.

Formats that a browser cannot take apart this way, such as HEIC, AVIF, TIFF and BMP, are drawn onto a canvas and saved again as JPG or PNG. That new file contains only the pixels. In every case the new file is read again before you download it, so you can see the result for yourself.

You can remove metadata from photo free of charge here, with no sign-up, no watermark and no daily limit. Each batch can hold up to 500 pictures of 200 MB each, and you can clear the list and start again as often as you like.

Because your own device does the work, there is no queue and no waiting for a server. Your settings, such as the mode, the colour profile option and the format for HEIC files, are remembered in your browser for the next visit.

Cleaning in bulk is also useful before you compress pictures: the hidden blocks can be tens of kilobytes per photo, and Compress Image or Resize Image can then make the clean files smaller still.

Your photos are not uploaded. Reading the details, cleaning the files and building the ZIP all happen in your browser, on your own device. No copy of your pictures or of what is inside them reaches our servers.

That matters on a page like this one, because the very reason you clean a picture is that it holds things you do not want to share. The only outside link is the optional map link for the GPS position, which opens only when you click it. When you close the page, the pictures are gone from it.

To look at the details of a single picture in more depth without changing it, use Metadata Viewer. To hide faces, number plates or addresses that are visible in the picture itself, use Blur Image, and to add a visible copyright mark, Watermark Image.

For iPhone pictures, HEIC to JPG turns them into files that open everywhere. To make clean files lighter for the web or email, Compress Image and Resize Image help. All our picture tools are listed under Image Tools.