What your photos give away
Phones and cameras store a block of metadata - EXIF - inside every photo. It often includes the exact GPS location where the picture was taken, accurate to a few metres, along with the date and time, the phone or camera model, its serial number and the editing software. Post a photo taken at home and you may be posting your address. This tool shows what is in each photo, including a map link for any location, and strips it out.
No quality loss
Most EXIF removers redraw the photo and save a new JPEG, which recompresses it and lowers the quality every time. This one removes the metadata blocks from the file itself and copies the image data across unchanged, so the cleaned photo is pixel-for-pixel identical. The colour profile is kept by default because it holds colour information, not personal data. If the photo was taken sideways, a tiny orientation flag is kept so it still displays the right way up.
What is removed
EXIF (location, camera, dates, serial numbers), XMP and IPTC blocks (captions, author, copyright, keywords), comments, vendor maker notes, and PNG text chunks - which is where AI image generators store the full prompt and settings. JPG, PNG and WebP are supported. iPhone HEIC photos need converting to JPG first.
Don’t social networks strip it already?
Facebook, Instagram and X remove EXIF from images they display, but files sent by email, through many messaging apps as documents, uploaded to forums, marketplaces or your own website, or shared as cloud links usually keep everything. Clean photos before sharing them anywhere you do not control. Making the files smaller too? Use the image compressor afterwards.