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See what your photos are giving away, then remove it
Every field is listed before anything is taken out — including the coordinates, if your camera saved them. JPEGs are cleaned without re-encoding, so the pixels you get back are the ones you started with.
Your photos are processed on your own device and are never uploaded to a server.
See what your photos are giving away, then remove it
Drop a photo to see what it is telling people
Every field is listed before anything is removed — including the coordinates, if the camera saved them. Then one button takes the lot out.
- iPhone HEIC works
- Dropped straight from the camera roll. Converted to JPEG on the way out.
- Nothing is uploaded
- Every photo is processed inside this browser tab. No server ever sees it.
- Drop anywhere
- The whole page accepts photos — no need to aim for a small box.
A photo of a sweater can carry the location of the bed it was lying on
Your phone writes the coordinates into the file the moment the shutter goes, if the camera has location permission — which is the default on both iOS and Android. Nothing in the photo shows it. It survives being copied, renamed, emailed and cropped, because none of those touch the block it lives in.
Selling secondhand means photographing things where you live and then handing those files to strangers. Most of the time the platform re-encodes the image on upload and the coordinates are lost along the way. Sometimes it does not, and you have no way to tell from the outside which of those just happened.
What the photo shows
A sweater on a bed
Checked before listing. Nothing in the frame gives anything away.
What the file says
51.5072° N, 0.1276° W
Pastes straight into any map. It will not name the room, but it lands on the building.
One file. The buyer sees the first; anyone who downloads it can read the second in about ten seconds, using nothing but the photo viewer already on their computer.
What is removed, and what is not
Deleting every block that is not pixels is the easy version, and it damages photos. Three of those blocks describe how the colours should be read rather than who took them, and a resale photo whose colour no longer matches the garment is a returns problem. So they stay, and none of them says anything about you.
Removed
- GPS coordinates, altitude and heading
- Camera and lens make, model and serial number
- Date and time the photo was taken, to the second
- Author, copyright and description fields
- Editing history and the software that wrote the file
- XMP, IPTC and Photoshop blocks, plus any comment
Kept
- The colour profile. An iPhone photo is Display P3. Drop its profile and every viewer reads those numbers as plain sRGB, which visibly washes the colour out.
- The JFIF header. The standard opening block. It holds the print-size tag and identifies nobody; a file without it is technically neither JFIF nor Exif.
- The Adobe colour flag. Says how the components are stored. Remove it from an Adobe-saved CMYK file and decoders guess, usually inverting the image.
After the file is written it is read back and checked for leftover metadata segments, and the card reports the answer either way — including the answer nobody wants.
Removing it without re-compressing the photo
The simple way to remove metadata is to open the photo, decode it to pixels and save it again — the notes are dropped because nothing carried them across. It also re-compresses every pixel, and on a knitted or textured garment that is the detail doing the selling. Most tools offering to strip EXIF work exactly this way and do not mention it.
A JPEG does not need it. Metadata sits in its own segments beside the compressed scan, so the segments can be cut out and the scan copied across byte for byte. The result is the original file minus the notes, not a second-generation copy of it.
Two cases still cost one re-encode, and each card says which path it is taking before you press anything. A PNG or a HEIC keeps its metadata differently and has to be decoded, so those come back as JPEGs. And a photo carrying a rotation tag has to be turned first — which is the trap in the next paragraph.
Why stripped photos come out sideways
A phone does not rotate the image when you turn it. It records what the sensor saw and adds an orientation tag saying which way up the result goes, and every viewer reads that tag on the way to the screen. So the rotation is in the metadata — and a tool that deletes the metadata and nothing else has deleted the instruction along with the coordinates. The photo is sideways from that point on, permanently, because the note explaining which way up it went is the thing that was thrown away.
This tool reads the tag first and turns the actual pixels before removing anything. That is the one thing here that costs a generation of quality, it happens only to photos that were rotated, and the card names the rotation it found so you can see why.
What this cannot do
- Reach a photo you have already posted. This cleans the copy on your device. A file that is already on a listing, in a message thread or in someone's downloads folder is out of reach of any tool — the only move there is to delete the upload and replace it.
- See what is in the picture. Metadata is the invisible half. A house number through a window, a name on a parcel in the background, a reflection in a mirror — those are still there afterwards, and they are worth a second look before you list.
- Tell you what a platform does next. Once the file is uploaded it is re-processed on someone else's terms, and that can add its own identifiers. Cleaning beforehand controls what you hand over, which is the part that is actually yours to control.
- Itemise every private field it removes. The list on each card covers the standard EXIF, GPS and IPTC fields. Some cameras also write vendor-specific blocks that no public specification describes; those are removed with everything else, but they cannot be shown to you field by field.
Common questions
- What is EXIF data, and what is actually in my photos?
- EXIF is a block of notes your camera writes into the image file alongside the pixels. Typically: the date and time to the second, the make and model of the phone or camera, the lens and exposure settings, the editing software, often a serial number unique to that specific camera body — and, if location services were on, the GPS coordinates of where you stood. None of it is visible in the photo. This tool lists every field it finds before it removes anything, so you can see your own rather than take a list on trust.
- Do my photos really contain my home address?
- Not an address — coordinates, which is worse in the sense that they need no lookup. A latitude and longitude pastes straight into any map and lands on the building. Phones write them whenever the camera has location permission, which is the default on both iOS and Android, and a photo taken indoors is still located: the phone falls back to nearby Wi-Fi and cell towers. The exceptions are screenshots, photos saved from someone else's post, and files that have already been through a platform that re-encodes them.
- Don't Poshmark, eBay and Vinted remove this automatically?
- Usually, but it is not something you can verify from outside, and it varies by platform and by upload path — the app, the website and a cross-listing tool do not always process a file the same way. It also does nothing for the copies that never go through a listing at all: the ones you send in a message to a buyer, email, put in a shared folder, or hand to a cross-posting service. Cleaning the file before it leaves your device is the only version of this you can check for yourself.
- Does removing EXIF data reduce my photo's quality?
- Not here, for an ordinary JPEG. A JPEG keeps its metadata in separate segments beside the compressed image, so those segments can be cut out and the compressed pixels copied across byte for byte — the file you get back is the file you put in, minus the notes. Two cases do cost one re-encode, and the tool says which before you press the button: a photo carrying a rotation tag, and any format that is not a JPEG.
- Why do other EXIF removers turn my photos sideways?
- Because a photo's rotation is stored in the metadata. Phones record the image the way the sensor saw it and add an orientation tag saying which way up it goes, so a tool that deletes the metadata and nothing else deletes the instruction too — and the photo is sideways from then on, with no tag left to explain it. This tool applies the rotation to the pixels first, which is why a rotated photo is the one case that costs a re-encode.
- Are my photos uploaded anywhere?
- No. Everything happens inside this browser tab, and there is no server to send a photo to. You can confirm it rather than believe it: open your browser's network inspector, drop in a photo, clean it, and watch that no request leaves while it happens. A privacy tool that asked you to upload the file you are worried about would be a strange thing to build.
- Can I remove the data from several photos at once?
- Yes. Drop in the whole set — every photo is listed with its own findings, one button cleans all of them, and they come back as a zip. Nothing is queued on a server, so the only limit is your device: a batch of twenty phone photos is unremarkable.
More free photo tools
All of them run on your own device, all of them are free, and none of them ask who you are.