Free image metadata remover

Every photo is two things at once: a picture, and a written record of the circumstances in which it was made. An image metadata remover deletes the second part and leaves the first alone. That record is stored in three overlapping standards — EXIF, IPTC and XMP — and between them they hold your GPS coordinates, your camera's serial number, the exact second of capture, the software you edited with, and very often your name.

None of it is visible when you look at the image. All of it travels with the file when you email it, message it, or hand it to a client.

A free online image metadata remover that doesn't upload anything

This is an online image metadata remover in the literal sense: it lives at a web address and there is nothing to install. It is not, however, an upload service. There is no endpoint that receives your photo. Every byte is read, parsed and rewritten by code running inside your own browser.

That distinction has practical consequences. There is no file size cap, because there is no upload to time out. There is no queue, because there is no shared server. And there is no retention policy for you to take on trust, because we never receive a file to retain. You can confirm all of this yourself: open your browser's Network tab and clean an image — you will see no requests. Install the site and switch off your network, and it still works.

EXIF remover or metadata remover?

An EXIF remover strictly deletes the EXIF block — the camera's own record of make, model, serial number, exposure and GPS. A full metadata remover also clears IPTC, XMP, ICC colour profiles, PNG text chunks, C2PA content credentials and AI generation parameters, which live in different parts of the file and quietly survive an EXIF-only clean. This tool does the full version and shows you each block it finds before anything is deleted. To read the fields without changing the file, the EXIF viewer is read-only.

What your photos are actually carrying

The fields worth caring about, roughly in order of how much they give away:

• GPS coordinates. Latitude, longitude and usually altitude, accurate to a few metres, often with the compass bearing the camera was facing. This does not tell someone your city. It tells them which building, and roughly which floor.
• Device and lens serial numbers. Unique identifiers written into every frame that camera produces — a durable link between every photo you have ever taken, even across accounts with nothing else in common.
• The embedded thumbnail. Cameras store a small preview inside the EXIF block. Some editors regenerate it after you edit; many do not. If you cropped someone out and the thumbnail was not refreshed, the original framing is still in the file.
• Names and copyright. Editing software asks for your name once during setup and then writes it into everything you export.
• Edit history. XMP records a document identifier that survives saving, plus a chain of which applications touched the file and when.

Lossless removal, which is the part most tools get wrong

There are two ways to build a metadata remover. The easy way is to draw the image onto a canvas and export it — three lines of code, and the metadata disappears because canvas has no concept of metadata. It also decodes and re-encodes your photo, so what you get back is a re-compression of your original rather than your original with the tags removed. Do it twice and the loss compounds.

The harder way is to understand the file format. Image containers keep the compressed picture and the metadata in separate places, so if you can read the structure you can remove one without touching the other. That is what this tool does, with a dedicated parser for each format: JPEG marker segments, PNG chunks, WebP RIFF chunks, TIFF directories, and the ISO box structure behind HEIC, AVIF, MP4 and MOV.

The result is that cleaning a file costs you nothing. After every removal the finished file is parsed again from scratch to list anything remaining, and both files are decoded so every pixel can be compared against the original. When the tool reports zero pixels changed, that is a measurement taken on your machine, not a claim. The full engineering write-up is here.

Formats, and a bulk image metadata remover for whole folders

Images: JPG and JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, GIF and TIFF. Video: MP4 and MOV — a phone clip carries GPS coordinates and your device model exactly as a photo does, so there is a dedicated video metadata remover for footage as well as stills.

Files are identified by their magic bytes rather than their extension, so a PNG someone renamed to .jpg is still handled correctly. If you have a camera roll rather than a single photo, the bulk image metadata remover takes as many files as you care to drop, processes them one after another so memory stays flat, and returns them as a single ZIP. There is no twenty-file limit, because there is no server paying for the work.

AI images, C2PA credentials and ChatGPT

AI generators leave their own trail. Stable Diffusion interfaces write the complete prompt, negative prompt, seed, sampler and model hash into PNG text chunks, readable in any text editor. Midjourney, DALL·E and Adobe Firefly write generator names into EXIF and XMP fields. Images from ChatGPT, DALL·E 3 and Sora carry a cryptographically signed C2PA content credential recording that they were made with AI.

The AI metadata remover surfaces all of it, and there is a dedicated page for ChatGPT image metadata. Two honest notes. Removing metadata does not make an image undetectable as AI — classifiers work on the pixels, and invisible watermarks survive metadata removal entirely. And several platforms ask for AI content to be disclosed, with the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency rules applying from 2 August 2026. We will show you what is in your file and remove it if you ask. We will not help you pass AI work off as something it is not, which is also why this tool does not modify your pixels to defeat detectors.

Who this is for

• Photographers and lifestyle bloggers publishing shoots without broadcasting a home studio's address or a camera body's serial number.
• Anyone sharing a photo taken at home — a pet on a sofa, a plant on a windowsill. They read as harmless and carry coordinates precise to a few metres.
• Journalists and researchers handling images from sources, where the embedded location is the thing that must not travel onward.
• Sellers and agencies republishing supplied images, where someone else's metadata quietly becomes your disclosure problem.

Free, without the usual catch

No account, no watermark, no paid tier holding the useful part back, and no trade of quality for privacy. Running this costs almost nothing because the work happens on your device, so there is no per-file compute to recover. If you only want to look rather than change anything, the EXIF viewer reads the same data and removes nothing at all.