Remove image metadata

What a file carries besides the picture

An image file can hold much more than pixels. EXIF records the camera, the lens, the date and sometimes the GPS position of the photo. XMP and IPTC hold captions, authors, ratings and edit history. An ICC profile describes the colour space. PNG files can contain text fields that some programs use for settings. Content Credentials, also called C2PA, is a signed record of how a file was made.

The table cleans three test files. The sample JPEG, 104 KB, held EXIF, GPS, XMP, IPTC, ICC, C2PA. After cleaning it was 101 KB, and the PNG went from 302 KB to 301 KB. Metadata is usually a small part of a file, so the main reason to remove it is privacy, with a small saving on top.

Location is the one to watch

Phones often write the coordinates of where a photo was taken. A photo posted with its metadata can tell a stranger where you live or where your child goes to school. The viewer flags a GPS location on the row so you can see it before you share. Metadata removal is on by default in every tool here.

Removal that leaves the pixels alone

For JPEG, PNG and WebP the tool removes the metadata blocks directly and does not re-encode the picture. In the table the JPEG, the WebP and the PNG all came back with identical pixels, which we checked by decoding each file before and after and comparing every value. One small orientation tag stays in JPEG and WebP so a rotated photo still opens upright.

You can keep the colour profile, which helps accuracy on wide-gamut screens, and keep the author and copyright lines if you want your credit to travel with the file.

AVIF, HEIC, GIF and BMP files cannot be cleaned in place. They are decoded and saved again, which changes the pixels slightly.

About Content Credentials

Some tools sign an image with a manifest that records who made or edited it and sometimes that AI was involved. This page can show that record and remove it. Removing it is a privacy and file size step. It also deletes the signed history, so keep your original if you may need to show where a file came from.

Do not use it to pass a generated or edited image off as an untouched photograph. Some platforms and rules require disclosure, and a missing manifest says nothing about how an image was made. This tool also leaves invisible watermarks that some generators put into the pixels, and it does not touch visible marks in the picture.

What it does not remove

Text or logos drawn on the picture stay. So does the file name, which you can change in Advanced settings, under File names. If you need to see everything first, the EXIF viewer lists it without changing anything.