Remove EXIF data from photos online

Your phone records where you were when you took the photo. It records the camera model, the lens, the time, the orientation, sometimes the altitude. All of that gets saved inside the image file as EXIF data.

When you share that photo, the EXIF goes with it. Some social platforms strip it. Many don't. Email and cloud storage almost always preserve it.

Metacleaner removes EXIF from JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and more than a dozen other image formats. Drop the file in, download the cleaned version. The image you see doesn't change.

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Phone showing a photo about to be shared, illustrating EXIF data leakage

Drop a photo to strip its EXIF data

JPEG, PNG, TIFF and more. The cleaned file downloads automatically.

What EXIF data actually contains

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. It's a standard from the mid-1990s, now baked into almost every digital camera and smartphone. The fields a typical photo carries:

  • GPS coordinates. latitude and longitude, often to within a few metres
  • Date and time. when the photo was taken, including time zone on newer devices
  • Camera make and model. and frequently the serial number
  • Lens information. focal length, aperture, shutter speed
  • Software. what was used to edit the photo, if anything
  • Orientation and resolution. how the image was framed
  • Thumbnail. a small embedded preview that can survive cropping

The privacy issue is mostly the GPS data. A photo from your house tells anyone with a free EXIF viewer where you live. A photo from your office tells them where you work. A photo from a hotel in another city tells them you're not home.

There's a well-known case from 2012: anti-virus founder John McAfee was on the run in Belize and ended up in Guatemala. A reporter from Vice posted a photo with him. The EXIF GPS coordinates pinpointed his location. He was arrested within days.

Which formats does it work on?

Metacleaner handles the common photo formats and the less common ones:

JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg, .jpe), PNG, TIFF (.tif, .tiff), GIF, HEIC/HEIF, JPEG 2000 (.jp2, .jpf, .jpm, .jpx), JNG, MNG, and Photoshop files (.psd, .psb).

Note: GIF doesn't support EXIF as standard, but other metadata fields can still exist in the file and will be cleaned.

How to remove EXIF data

  1. Open metacleaner.com.
  2. Drag the photo onto the upload area, or click to select it.
  3. Wait a few seconds. Most images clean in well under ten.
  4. The cleaned file downloads automatically.

The visible image stays the same. The pixels aren't re-encoded, so there's no quality loss.

What if I want to remove EXIF from lots of photos?

The free tier handles one file per day for unregistered users, five for registered. The basic plan at €5/month allows bulk cleaning. The advance plan at €30/month adds API access, useful if you're cleaning images as part of a publishing workflow or a content management system. Pricing details →

Should I just turn off geotagging instead?

That's a reasonable preventive step, but it doesn't help with photos you already have. EXIF removal is the cleanup. Geotagging-off is the prevention. Most people end up doing both for different reasons.

Frequently asked

Will the photo lose quality?

No. Removing metadata doesn't touch the pixel data.

Does it strip the embedded thumbnail?

Yes. The thumbnail is part of the metadata.

What about XMP and IPTC data?

Those are sibling metadata standards used alongside EXIF. The cleaner removes them too.

Can the original metadata be recovered after cleaning?

Not from the cleaned file. The information is removed, not hidden.

Is the upload encrypted?

Yes.

Do you keep my photos?

No. We don't store your files or your metadata.

Cleaning EXIF from an automated workflow

The Metacleaner API accepts image uploads via multipart form data and returns the cleaned file URL. Useful for any application that publishes or distributes user-submitted photos and needs to strip EXIF before they go live. API documentation →

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