See and remove the hidden data in a photo
Almost every photograph a phone or a camera makes carries a block of writing nobody ever looks at: where you were standing, accurate to a few metres, what the time was, which camera took it and frequently whose name is on it. Open a JPEG, PNG or WebP above and all of it is listed in ordinary words rather than as field names. Press Remove and the same photograph comes back without any of it, and without the picture ever being decoded and drawn again.
See what a photo is carrying, then take it out
Open a photograph here and it will tell you, in plain words, what the file is quietly carrying about you: where you were standing, what you were holding and what time you pressed the button. Then it will take all of it back out and hand you the same picture without it.
Nothing is looked up anywhere: the coordinates are shown as the numbers the camera wrote and are never turned into an address, and no face in the picture is examined for anything at all. HEIC, which is what an iPhone shoots by default, cannot be opened here because no browser outside Safari can decode one. One picture at a time, up to 32 MB.
Nothing you open here is uploaded. The whole tool runs inside this tab, on your machine.
Photo metadata, step by step
- Open the photographChoose a JPEG, PNG or WebP, or drag one onto the box. A picture straight off a phone, before it has been through a chat app, is the one worth looking at.
- Read what it says about youEach thing found is written out with a line beside it explaining what it gives away, so you do not need to know what an f-stop or a datum is to follow it.
- Take it out and keep the picturePress Remove and save the clean copy. The compressed picture is carried straight across, so what you get is the same photograph rather than a new copy of one.
Why this rewrites the file around the picture instead of redrawing it
A JPEG is a run of segments, a PNG is a run of chunks and a WebP is a run of RIFF blocks, and in all three the metadata sits in blocks of its own alongside the compressed picture rather than mixed into it. So the job is to walk the list, drop the blocks that carry writing, and put the rest back in the order they came, which is what happens here. The picture itself is copied over as bytes and is never handed to a decoder. That distinction matters more than it sounds: the quick way to build this tool is to draw the photograph onto a canvas and read it back out, which does lose the metadata and also throws away every original coefficient and replaces them with whatever the browser feels like, so a file that went in at full quality comes out a generation down with nobody told. One field survives on purpose. Which way up a picture goes is recorded in the same block as everything else, so a camera held sideways that loses its note comes out on its side, and where that applies the block is replaced with a 26 byte one carrying the rotation and nothing whatever besides.
The reason this catches people out is that nothing about a photograph gives any hint that the notebook is there. It survives being emailed, being put on a website, being copied onto a memory stick and being renamed. It does not survive being sent through most chat apps, which quietly strip it, and that inconsistency is exactly why nobody has a reliable instinct about it: the same picture arrives clean one way and fully annotated the other, and there is no way to tell which by looking.
The field worth caring about is the location. A camera that has a satellite receiver in it, which means every phone made in the last fifteen years, writes down where it was to about the accuracy of a front garden. On a holiday photograph that is a place you visited. On a photograph of something you are selling, taken in your kitchen, it is where you live, published alongside a description of something valuable you own and a way to contact you.
Everything else in there is milder and still worth seeing once. The timestamp is the camera clock rather than the file date, so it survives edits that reset everything else. The serial number of the camera body ties every photograph you have ever put online back to the same piece of hardware. The name of the editing program says what you work in. None of it is sinister on its own, and the point of listing it in words rather than as a table of tags is that you get to decide which of it you mind.
Questions
What is EXIF, and why is it in my photo at all?
It is a little notebook the camera fills in as it works, tucked into a corner of the file that no viewer shows you. It was invented so that photographers could see what settings a shot was taken at, which is genuinely useful, and then phones started writing satellite coordinates into the same notebook and nobody moved the switch.
Does taking it out change how the picture looks?
No. The compressed picture is copied across byte for byte and never decoded, so the file that comes out is the same photograph at the same quality, only smaller by however much writing came off it. The colour profile, if there is one, is left alone as well, because removing that genuinely would change the colours on screen.
My iPhone photos will not open here. Why not?
Because they are almost certainly HEIC, and no browser other than Safari can decode one. Rather than half work, this refuses them and says so. Sharing or exporting the photo as a JPEG first gets you a file this can read, and the copy will be carrying the same notebook, which is rather the point.
Why is there no map showing where the photo was taken?
Because a map means asking a map company for the square of the world you were standing in, and doing that on this page in particular would be ridiculous. You would have arrived wanting to know who can tell where you live and told one more company on the way in. The numbers are there with a button to copy them, and where you paste them is your business.
Is a stripped photo really anonymous now?
It is free of the writing, which is the part people are surprised by. It is not free of the photograph. A house number, a school badge or a view out of a window says plenty, and some cameras leave faint sensor patterns that forensic work can match. This removes what the file says, and looking at what the picture shows is still your job.
Other things here
There is a full list on the free tools page. They all work the same way: in the browser, with nothing to install.