webtools

EXIF Viewer and Remover

Private: nothing leaves your browser

Drop a photo in. It is read on your device and never uploaded.

A photo straight off a phone usually carries far more than the picture: the camera and lens that took it, the exact second it was taken, the serial number of the body, and very often the coordinates of the spot you were standing on. This page reads all of that out in plain English, tells you loudly when a file knows where you live, and hands back a clean copy with every tag stripped. The file is read by this page alone and never uploaded, which matters more here than on any other tool: sending a photo somewhere to find out whether it leaks your address would rather defeat the point.

About EXIF and why it matters

EXIF is a block of data your camera writes inside the image file itself. It was designed to be useful, and it is: the shutter speed, the aperture and the ISO are how a photographer works out what went wrong with a shot. The trouble is that phones write a great deal more than that. A modern handset records the make and model, the lens, the software version, a timestamp to the second and, unless you have turned location off for the camera, a latitude and longitude accurate to a few metres.

That travels with the file. Email a holiday photo and the recipient can read where it was taken. Sell something on a marketplace with a picture taken in your living room and the listing carries your home coordinates. Most large social networks strip metadata on upload, which is why people assume it is never a problem, but a direct message, a forum attachment, a cloud folder share and an email attachment all keep the file exactly as it came off the phone.

Reading it is the easy half. Removing it is done here by redrawing the picture on a canvas and encoding it again, which gives back pixels and nothing else, so every tag goes at once. One detail has to be handled on the way through: the orientation tag is the thing telling your viewer that a photo taken in portrait is not lying on its side, so it is applied to the pixels before it is discarded. Strip it naively and the clean copy comes out sideways. Anything else here that redraws a picture has the same side effect: compressing or resizing a photo also leaves every tag behind, so if you were going to do one of those anyway, the metadata goes with it.

How to view and remove EXIF and GPS data

  1. Drop your photos on the box, click it to browse, or paste one straight onto the page.
  2. Read the list. Each row says how many tags that file carries and whether one of them is a location.
  3. Click any row to see its tags in full underneath. Copy metadata puts them on the clipboard as text.
  4. If the red bar appears, that photo records where it was taken. The coordinates are shown as plain text, never as a map link.
  5. Press Download clean copy. One photo saves as a file, several arrive together as a ZIP.

Common questions about EXIF and GPS data

Does my photo really contain my location?
Only if the camera had permission to use location when the picture was taken, but on a phone that is the default and most people have never changed it. Drop a photo in and this page will tell you either way in one line. When coordinates are present they are shown to six decimal places, which is roughly a tenth of a metre: enough to identify a front door rather than a city, which is exactly why it is worth checking before you send a picture to a stranger.

Why do you not show the location on a map?
Because embedding a map means sending your coordinates to whoever runs it, which is the precise thing this page exists to warn you about. A tool that says your photo leaks your address and then quietly forwards that address to a mapping company is not a privacy tool. The numbers are shown as plain text with a copy button, so you can paste them wherever you choose, knowingly.

Is the photo uploaded to remove the metadata?
No. Everything happens in your browser: the file is read as bytes, the EXIF block is parsed by JavaScript on this page, and the clean copy is produced by your own graphics engine. Nothing is sent, logged or stored. This is the page where you should check that rather than assume it, because the whole job is not leaking a location: press F12, open the Network tab and load a photo, and no request appears carrying it anywhere. Then load the page, switch your connection off and strip a photo offline, which an upload based tool cannot do at all.

Does removing the metadata change the picture?
Slightly, and it is only fair to say so. Stripping the tags is done by redrawing the image and encoding it again, and for a JPEG that second encode is lossy, so the clean file is re-compressed and will not be byte for byte identical to the original. It is written at 92 percent quality, which is high enough that the difference is not visible at normal size, but it is a real change. A PNG or WebP is written losslessly and the pixels come back untouched.

Why is the clean copy sometimes the right way up when the original was not?
Because the orientation tag is itself metadata, and once it is gone nothing is left to tell a viewer which way up the photo goes. Rather than drop it and let your picture come out sideways, this page turns the pixels themselves to match the tag first and then removes it. The result is a photo that is the right way up everywhere, with no tag to interpret. If you would rather control the turn yourself, use the rotate tool.

What about PNG files, which have no EXIF?
PNG uses text chunks instead, and plenty of software writes into them: editors leave their name, screenshot tools leave a timestamp and image generators leave the whole prompt. This page reads the tEXt and iTXt chunks and lists whatever it finds. A compressed chunk is reported as present rather than decoded, because saying that something is there matters more than reading it. The clean copy drops all of them either way.

Can I check a whole folder at once?
Yes. Drop in as many as you like and each gets a row saying what it carries, so one glance finds the single photo in forty that has coordinates on it. Click a row to read that file's tags in full. Download gives you one file if there is one, and a ZIP of clean copies if there are several, since a browser asks permission for every separate download and twenty prompts is nobody's idea of a tool.

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