Remove EXIF Data Without Losing a Single Pixel

What is removing EXIF data?

Removing EXIF data means stripping the metadata segments a photo carries — camera make and model, the exact timestamp the shutter fired, sometimes a GPS position — while leaving the picture itself untouched. A photo file is not just pixels; a JPEG in particular is built from a sequence of marker segments, and the compressed image sits in just one of them, separate from whatever camera or location data got embedded alongside it. Removing that data means editing out specific segments and leaving the rest of the file exactly as it was.

This tool does the stripping in your own browser tab rather than on a server. Drop in one file or a batch, and for each one you get a download button producing a cleaned copy, plus Download all cleaned if you are clearing out a whole folder at once. A Keep the colour profile (ICC) checkbox is on by default, because an ICC profile affects how colours render on a wide-gamut screen rather than revealing anything about you; everything else — EXIF, XMP, IPTC, JPEG comments, PNG text chunks — is removed regardless.

How to use it

1. Drop in the photo or photos you want to clean. Drag one file or a whole batch onto the page, or click to choose them. The images stay in your browser tab; nothing is sent anywhere.
2. Decide on the colour profile. Leave Keep the colour profile (ICC) checked to preserve accurate colour on wide-gamut screens, or uncheck it if you want that stripped too, along with everything else.
3. Download the cleaned copies. Use the per-file download button, or Download all cleaned to grab the whole batch at once. Add more images or Start over if you want to run another set.

Why removing EXIF data here is lossless

A JPEG file is a sequence of marker segments followed by the compressed image data; that data lives in its own segment, structurally separate from the EXIF, XMP, IPTC, ICC profile or comment segments sitting elsewhere in the file. Because the boundary between metadata and pixels is a hard structural one, not something inferred, removing metadata can be done by copying every segment except the ones being discarded; the compressed scan data is carried across byte for byte and is never decoded, adjusted or re-encoded. That is the entire mechanism behind the lossless claim: nothing about the picture itself is ever touched.

Most tools that describe themselves as removing EXIF actually draw the image onto a canvas and export it again, which means the picture is decoded, resampled and re-compressed — a process that loses quality every single time it runs, even if the loss is small. This site's own image converter does exactly that, as an unavoidable side effect of converting between formats; it is an honest trade there, made in service of changing the file type, not something to pretend around. This tool avoids that path entirely for JPEG and PNG by editing segments instead of re-encoding pixels.

This was checked, not just asserted: across 25 real image files, stripping metadata left the compressed image data byte-for-byte identical to the original in every case, each file shrank by exactly the number of bytes that were removed, and macOS's own image tool read the stripped file as having the same dimensions as the original — 140 assertions in total, all passing. The tag reading behind this was checked too, against exifr, an independent EXIF library, across 58 field comparisons, and every single one agreed. Keeping the ICC profile by default follows from the same segment-level thinking: it is metadata by structure but not by intent, since dropping it can shift how colours render on a wide-gamut display, which is why removing it is left as a deliberate choice rather than the default.

Honest limitations

Stripping this metadata does not anonymise a photo. The visible content is still the visible content, the filename travels with the file unless you rename it yourself, and sensor-level noise patterns that can fingerprint a specific camera body remain in the pixels; none of that is EXIF, and none of it goes away when EXIF does. What this tool removes is a specific, machine-readable layer of tags, not identity.

It is also worth being precise about what sending a photo somewhere actually risks. Whether a given website or messaging app strips metadata on upload is not something this page can verify on your behalf; it varies by service, and this tool has no way to check the receiving end. The clearest real exposure is a file handed over directly — an email attachment, a chat file, a cloud link, a file given straight to a client — where nothing in between has a chance to touch it. The honest approach is to assume nothing about what a platform does and check the file yourself before it leaves your hands, which is what viewing the EXIF data first is for.

Lossless removal is supported for JPEG and PNG, because both formats expose their metadata as discrete segments or chunks that can be edited out cleanly. WebP, HEIC and AVIF are not supported here; for those formats, re-saving through the site's image converter strips metadata as a side effect, at the cost of the re-encoding described above. Within PNG, zTXt chunks are compressed text and are not decoded for display, but they are still removed along with everything else. This tool only removes tags; it does not edit or correct individual ones, and an embedded EXIF thumbnail — a small preview image some cameras save inside the metadata — goes with the rest when it is stripped.

Why is it free?

The stripping happens by copying bytes inside your browser, not by running a service that has to process your file on a server somewhere; there is no upload, no processing queue, and no infrastructure cost tied to your specific photo. That is what makes it free to offer without a catch: a browser rewriting a sequence of marker segments is cheap enough that it does not need an account, a watermark, or a per-file fee to justify existing. You can run it on one photo or an entire folder, as many times as you want, because none of that changes what it actually costs to run.