EXIF Viewer & Remover

Inspect EXIF metadata in photos and strip it for privacy

Click to select or drop a photo

How it works

EXIF Viewer & Remover — Inspect EXIF metadata in photos and strip it for privacy. All processing happens in your browser — no upload, no signup, no email required. Free forever.

Last updated: 2026-05-06

Editor's note

The first time you see your home GPS coordinates baked into a photo you texted a stranger off a marketplace listing, you stop trusting "just send the picture" forever. That happened to one of us with a couch sale and a screenshot of a map opened from the original JPG; the buyer was polite enough to mention it. Every JPG out of a phone carries this baggage by default and most people have no idea, because the phone gallery hides it behind a tidy thumbnail with no metadata indicator anywhere.

Strip-by-default is the only sane shipping behavior for a tool like this, and the viewer half exists so you can see exactly what would have leaked before you decide. We refuse to treat the viewer and the cleaner as separate tools because they belong together — looking at the GPS row and then clicking Download cleaned is the entire emotional arc, and splitting them across two pages would let people skip the part where they confront what was actually in the file.

About EXIF Viewer & Remover

EXIF Viewer & Remover reads the hidden metadata embedded in your photos — camera model, lens, exposure, timestamp, GPS coordinates — and lets you strip it out with one click. Every JPG straight from a phone or camera carries this baggage, and it's a common source of accidental privacy leaks: posting a holiday photo can quietly broadcast your home address through the GPS tags.

Journalists, activists, lawyers, second-hand sellers, and anyone publishing photos online use it to protect themselves before sharing. Photographers use the viewer side to verify exposure data when reviewing shoots. It's the rare tool where the read-only view and the destructive clean both matter equally.

Both inspection and metadata removal run entirely in the browser — your photos are never uploaded. That's the entire point: a tool that removes private data must not, itself, transmit your photos to a server.

How to use EXIF Viewer & Remover

Drop a JPG (or pick one from disk) — PNGs and WebPs carry less metadata but are also supported.
Read the EXIF table: camera, lens, exposure triangle, timestamp, software, GPS coordinates if present.
If GPS or other sensitive fields appear, click Download cleaned to save a metadata-free copy.
Compare the cleaned download against the original — visual quality is preserved at JPEG 0.95.
Repeat for any other photos before uploading them publicly.

Common use cases

Stripping GPS coordinates from a holiday photo before posting it on Instagram or Twitter.
Cleaning serial numbers and lens identifiers from camera samples before listing gear on Marketplace.
Removing timestamps from screenshots that accidentally embed system clock info.
Auditing a photo received from someone else to see what device captured it and when.
Preparing evidence photos for a legal context where original metadata must be preserved separately and the published copy must be sanitised.

Tips & common mistakes

Always check before publishing photos of your home, hotel, or workplace — GPS tags can pinpoint the exact building.
Many social platforms strip EXIF on upload, but not all (Flickr, image hosts, direct downloads from messaging apps often keep it). Treat 'platform will clean it' as unsafe.
Cleaning re-encodes the JPEG once; visual quality is virtually identical at 0.95 but pixel-exact comparison will show tiny differences.
If you need to preserve the original for archival reasons, keep it locally and only upload the cleaned copy.

Frequently asked questions

What kind of data lives in EXIF?

Camera make/model, lens, exposure, date/time, and often GPS coordinates and software identifiers. Useful for archives — but a privacy concern when sharing online.

Does the cleaned download keep image quality?

We re-encode through canvas to JPEG quality 0.95, so the visual quality is virtually identical, but all metadata (EXIF, IPTC, XMP, color profiles) is dropped.

Are GPS coordinates highlighted?

Yes — any GPSLatitude/GPSLongitude tags appear in the table and are removed when you download the cleaned copy.

What metadata, exactly, does the cleaner remove?

The full set: EXIF (camera/lens/exposure/GPS/timestamp), IPTC (caption, keywords, author), XMP (Adobe-style metadata), and embedded ICC colour profiles. The result is a clean image with only pixel data and basic JPEG headers.

Can someone recover the GPS data from the cleaned file?

No. The metadata isn't 'hidden' or encrypted — it's a separate section of the file that we don't write to the cleaned copy. There's nothing to recover unless they have access to the original.

Does removing EXIF affect the photo's colours?

If the original had an embedded colour profile (e.g. Display P3 from an iPhone), the cleaned sRGB output may look very slightly different on wide-gamut screens. For most photos and most viewers, the difference is invisible.

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