Image Metadata Remover

Step by step with the Image Metadata Remover

1. Add your photos. Each one lists what it contains, such as a GPS location or camera details.
2. Select a photo to see the details found in it.
3. Leave Keep colour profile ticked so colours do not shift, and Keep orientation ticked so photos stay the right way up.
4. Select Remove metadata. Each file is cleaned and then read back and checked.
5. Download the cleaned copies one by one, or all of them as a ZIP.

A real example

A photo straight from a phone, before and after:

The result reads: Removed: EXIF, XMP · lossless, image data untouched · Verified: no location, camera, date or text metadata remains (only the orientation tag was kept).

What happens to your image

Image files are containers: the picture is stored in one part and everything else in separate, labelled blocks. In a JPEG these are segments (APP1 for EXIF and XMP, APP13 for IPTC, COM for comments); in a PNG they are chunks (eXIf, tEXt, iTXt, zTXt, tIME); in a WebP, EXIF and XMP chunks; in a GIF, comment and application extensions. The remover walks the file block by block and copies every block except those, so the compressed picture data is copied byte for byte and never re-encoded.

Two things are kept by default because they change how the picture looks and identify nobody: the ICC colour profile, and the orientation. For the orientation, the whole EXIF block is replaced by a new one containing that single value. Anything stored after the end of a JPEG, such as the extra images of a multi-picture file, is dropped too, since it can carry a second full set of EXIF data.

TIFF, AVIF and HEIC cannot be cleaned block by block here, so they are redrawn from their pixels and saved as PNG (TIFF) or high-quality JPEG, which carries no metadata at all; the result names the format used. Every cleaned file is then parsed again and the result reports what, if anything, is still in it.

When the Image Metadata Remover helps

• Removing the GPS position of your home from photos before posting them in a listing or on social media.
• Sending photos to a journalist or an organisation without the camera's serial number.
• Cleaning images before publishing them on a website.
• Checking what a photo from someone else reveals about where and when it was taken.

If the result is not what you expected

The photo is sideways after cleaning

The picture was stored sideways and relied on its orientation tag to be displayed upright. Keep orientation ticked keeps just that one tag, with nothing else in it, so the photo stays upright.

Colours look different after cleaning

The embedded colour profile was removed. Profiles such as Display P3 or Adobe RGB tell viewers how to show the colours, and they identify no one; keep Keep colour profile ticked.

A TIFF or HEIC file came back in a different format

Only JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF can be cleaned by removing their metadata blocks. Other formats are redrawn from their pixels and saved as PNG (from TIFF) or JPEG, which carries none of the original metadata across.

Questions about the Image Metadata Remover