Strip GPS and EXIF Data From Photos

A photo is two things: the picture you can see and a block of notes the camera wrote beside it. Those notes can say where you stood to within a few metres, which phone you were holding, what time it was, the name of the editing program, sometimes the owner's name and a camera serial number. Post the picture on a social network and the site will usually strip those notes. Email it, drop it into a shared folder, or send the file for a classified ad, and the notes may travel with it.

The short version: drop your photos into EXIF Remover, read what it found inside each one, press Remove hidden data, and download clean copies. Several photos come back as one ZIP.

What is hiding in a photo

Before it changes anything, the tool shows you what it found in each picture, listed under the thumbnail. It looks for these things:

• GPS location, with the actual latitude and longitude shown as a warning line: "Taken at latitude ..., longitude ...".
• Owner or author name, and copyright text.
• Camera serial number and lens serial number.
• Camera or phone model, shown as "Device", and a device name.
• The date and time the picture was taken.
• Editing software and the lens.
• A picture description and text comments.
• Maker notes, which are vendor-specific data written by the camera maker.
• XMP data and IPTC or Photoshop data, which are extra metadata blocks added by editing programs and photo libraries.

If a file has none of these, it says "No hidden data found." That check is useful by itself. Seeing a pair of coordinates under a photo of your front door is the quickest way to understand why people strip photos.

Which formats it takes

The tool accepts JPEG, PNG, WebP and iPhone HEIC pictures. For JPEG, PNG and WebP the cleaning is done on the file's bytes: the metadata blocks are cut out and the picture data is left exactly as it was. Nothing is re-encoded, so the picture is not recompressed and does not lose quality, and the file size drops by the size of the notes.

HEIC is the exception. An iPhone HEIC file cannot be edited safely in the browser, so the tool converts it to a JPEG and the clean copy has the same name with "-clean" and a .jpg ending, so IMG_1.HEIC becomes IMG_1-clean.jpg. The conversion is saved at high quality, and the picture is drawn fresh, which means the copy carries no metadata by construction. The tool tells you about the conversion in the result list, so there is no surprise. If you need a JPEG anyway, say for a form that does not accept HEIC, this does both jobs at once. Files are named after the original, with "-clean" added before the extension, so holiday.jpg becomes holiday-clean.jpg.

The rotation option

Many phones take every picture in the same direction and write a small flag that says "turn this a quarter when displaying". That flag is part of the metadata. The tool has a checkbox: Keep the rotation flag so the picture still shows upright. It is ticked by default, and for most pictures you should leave it ticked. Removing the flag from a picture that is stored sideways would make it show sideways everywhere.

If you untick it, the tool handles sideways pictures by turning the pixels themselves and saving the picture again. It tells you so in the result: the picture was turned upright and saved again because the rotation flag was removed, and the colour profile is not kept. So a sideways picture is the one case where an untick causes a re-encode. Pictures that are already upright are still cleaned without any re-encoding.

The check at the end

After cleaning, the tool reads each cleaned file again to confirm nothing is left. The result list shows a line per file. A good one reads "Clean: holiday-clean.jpg" followed by what was removed, such as GPS location, camera or phone model and date and time taken. If something remains, the line turns red and says "Some data may remain". That is a rare outcome, and the sensible response is to treat the file as not safe to share and try again.

One caveat: the tool cleans the file's embedded information. It does not blur faces, car number plates, street signs or the view from the window. A clean file with a visible house number on the front door still tells people where you live.

Trial limit and batches

You can drop many pictures at once. On the trial, a batch takes up to 5 pictures, and the tool tells you when it leaves some out. A paid plan removes that limit. A batch of one picture downloads as a single file, and a batch of several downloads as a ZIP called clean-pictures.zip. If two files have the same name, the tool gives them different names inside the ZIP.

Cleaning happens in your browser, so the originals are not uploaded to a server. Your own files stay as they are, and the clean copies are new files.

When to clean a photo

Social networks and messaging apps often strip location from pictures you post. Email, cloud links and file transfers usually do not. That is the tool's own advice, and it gives a good rule: clean the photo when you are sending the file itself rather than posting it. The common cases are:

• A photo for an online listing, such as a second-hand sale, a rental advert or a car for sale, when it was taken at home.
• A photo sent to a stranger, such as a buyer, a tenant or a service provider.
• Pictures from a child's room, a school or a workplace.
• Photos sent for an insurance claim or a forum post, where the date and device may not be wanted.
• A product photo you will share with customers, where you do not want the editing program or the owner's name inside.

If a picture is going to be part of a set that you also want to resize or compress for a web page, do the cleaning last. Resize and Crop, Compress Image and Convert Image are the tools to use for size and format, and finishing with EXIF Remover means the file you send is the file you checked, whatever the earlier tools did with the notes. There is a related walk-through in the convert iPhone HEIC photos to JPG guide.

Steps

1. Open EXIF Remover and drop in one or more photos.
2. Read the list under each thumbnail. Note any GPS coordinates or personal names.
3. Leave the rotation checkbox ticked unless you have a reason to untick it.
4. Press Remove hidden data.
5. Download the clean copy, or the ZIP if you cleaned several.
6. Read the result list. Every line should say Clean.
7. Send the clean copy and keep the original somewhere private.

The tool is a Professional Tool with 10 trial uses a day, then a $1 day pass or the $4.99 monthly plan. One press of Remove hidden data uses one trial use, however many pictures are in the batch.

Common mistakes

Assuming a social network cleaned the file you emailed. Posting the original and a clean copy and mixing them up afterwards. Unticking the rotation option and then being surprised that the picture was saved again. Forgetting that a visible landmark gives away a location without any coordinates. Ignoring a "Some data may remain" line. And throwing away the original, which may be the only copy with the location you wanted to remember.

Summary

Hidden photo notes are useful to you and risky to strangers. EXIF Remover shows what each picture contains, removes it without recompressing JPEG, PNG or WebP files, converts iPhone HEIC to a clean JPEG, and checks its own work. More tools for pictures are in the image tools category.

Open EXIF Remover→

Is there a kind of hidden data you want the tool to show? Tell us on the contact page.