What a photo tells the person you send it to
A photograph straight off a phone is not just an image. It carries a block of EXIF metadata recording the camera make and model, the exposure settings, the lens, the software that last touched it, and the exact second it was taken. If location services were on, it also carries the latitude and longitude to about five decimal places. Five decimal places is roughly a metre.
That has practical consequences people discover the hard way. A photo of something for sale posted to a marketplace gives the buyer your address. A picture of a child in a garden gives a stranger the garden. The serial number field in a camera body links every photo you have ever posted from that camera to the same physical device, which is how anonymous accounts get de-anonymised. None of this requires special tools to read: it is right there in the file, and this page reads it in your browser without the file leaving your device.
The good news is that the major social networks strip EXIF on upload, and have for years. The bad news is that email, messaging apps that send "as a file", cloud storage links, and every site that hosts an image without processing it do not.
Stripping without re-encoding
Almost every "remove EXIF online" tool works by decoding your image and saving it again, which does remove the metadata. It also throws away image quality in the process, because a JPEG re-encoded is a JPEG compressed twice. It is a real cost paid for no reason.
This page does it as a byte operation instead. A JPEG is a chain of segments; the metadata lives in APP segments, which are simply cut out, and the compressed image data is copied across untouched. The output has pixel-for-pixel identical image content to the input and is a few kilobytes smaller. PNG works the same way, with eXIf and the text chunks removed.
This is the one place on the site where the stripper and the compressor differ in kind, not degree. The compressor removes metadata as a side effect of re-encoding. This removes it while leaving the image exactly as it was.
Common problems
- No metadata shown for a photo you know has some. Only JPEG and PNG are read here. HEIC, RAW files and TIFF store metadata in structures this does not parse.
- The photo rotated after stripping. The orientation flag is EXIF too, so removing it removes the instruction to rotate. If your file relies on it, resize the image through the resizer first, which bakes the rotation into the pixels.
- A stripped file still shows a date. The filesystem timestamp is not in the image. Your operating system records when the file was created and copied, and no image tool can change that.
- Metadata but no location. Common and good. Location tagging is off by default on most cameras and is a per-app permission on phones.
Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded to read it?
No. The file is read into memory by your browser and parsed here in JavaScript. Open the network tab and drop a photo in: there is no request. For this tool in particular that is the point: a page that asks you to upload a photo to find out what private information it contains has an obvious problem.
Does the map link send my coordinates anywhere?
Only if you click it, and then only to OpenStreetMap, and only because you chose to. Nothing is fetched to show you the coordinates themselves; the link is built as text.
What is XMP and IPTC?
Two other metadata standards that ride in the same file. IPTC is the news and stock-photo one: captions, credits, keywords. XMP is Adobe's XML format and is where editing history and rights information end up. Both are listed and both are removed by the strip, because a photo carrying an editing history is telling on you just as much as one carrying coordinates.
Can stripped metadata be recovered?
Not from the stripped file. The bytes are gone, not hidden. But your original still has it, and so does every copy you already sent. Strip before sharing, not after.