Free Image Metadata Remover

Who should clean photo metadata before sharing

A phone photo can carry far more than the picture. The file may record the camera or phone model, the editing software, the date and time it was taken, and GPS coordinates. That is useful in a personal archive, but risky when the image goes to a public listing, a forum post or a stranger.

Typical cases include selling furniture online with photos taken at home, sending product shots to a client, posting screenshots of a project, or publishing staff photos on a company site. Journalists, landlords and anyone running a small online shop also benefit from a quick check before a file leaves their device.

A worked example with one phone photo

Say you add a 4.2 MB JPEG taken on a phone. After you run Inspect and clean, the detected tag panel may list Make, Model, DateTimeOriginal, Orientation, latitude and longitude. The block list underneath shows each segment found, such as APP1 (EXIF/XMP) marked Removed, APP0 marked Removed, and the size of each one.

The cleaned card then reports how many bytes were removed and confirms that pixel data was not re-encoded. If the EXIF block held 40 KB of tags and a small embedded preview, the cleaned file is roughly that much smaller, while the visible image stays identical. You can download it on its own or add up to nine more photos and save them together as cleaned-images.zip.

How the cleaning works

The tool reads the file structure directly instead of redrawing the image. In a JPEG it drops the APP1 segment that holds EXIF and XMP data, the APP13 segment used for IPTC captions, comment segments and the APP0 header. In a PNG it removes eXIf, tEXt, iTXt, zTXt and tIME chunks. In a WebP it removes the EXIF and XMP chunks and updates the header flags so the file stays valid.

Color profiles are kept by default because removing them can shift how colors look. Tick the ICC option if you want those removed too. Limits are up to 10 images per batch, 25 MB per file and 80 MB in total. Other formats, such as HEIC or GIF, are not processed and need converting to PNG or JPEG first.

Each result card lists every block it found and whether it was removed or retained, so you can see exactly what changed in the file.

Common mistakes to avoid

Do not share the inspection report when your goal is privacy. That JSON file lists the original tags, which can include the very GPS position you meant to remove. Share only the cleaned images.

Check rotation before you post. Phones often store a sideways photo plus an orientation tag, so a cleaned copy can appear rotated. Also remember that metadata removal does nothing for what is visible in the frame, such as a house number, a car plate or a reflection.