Free EXIF Data Viewer and Remover
What one photo can give away
Say you list a bike for sale and photograph it in your hallway. You post the picture exactly as your phone saved it. Hidden inside the file can be the date and time, your phone model, and, if location was on, the coordinates of your front door. Anyone who downloads the original can read them.
This tool shows what is inside each photo, and gives you a clean copy with it removed. It works with JPG, PNG and WebP, and nothing is uploaded.
How much can location data reveal?
More than most people expect. Phone GPS data is often precise to within a few metres, so the coordinates in a photo can point to a particular house, not just a neighbourhood. A set of photos over several weeks can reveal where you live, where you work, where your children go to school and when you are away. None of that needs hacking. It is simply written in the file, for anyone who opens it with the right software or a simple online viewer.
That does not mean you should panic about every photo. It means that photos you share publicly, or send to people you do not know well, are worth cleaning first.
What is removed and what is kept
Removed
- GPS location, date taken, camera or phone model, lens and software.
- Artist and copyright fields, and embedded XMP, IPTC and comment data in JPG.
- Text fields, EXIF and time stamps in PNG, and EXIF and XMP blocks in WebP.
Kept
- The picture itself. JPG metadata is cut out without recompressing, so the pixels do not change.
- The colour profile, so colours look the same.
One exception: a JPG stored sideways and relying on a rotation tag is re-saved at high quality so it stays upright.
A privacy checklist before you post photos
- Did you take it at home, at a child’s school or at your workplace? Strip the data.
- Are you sending the file by email, a cloud link or as a document in a chat app? These usually keep metadata. Many large social networks remove location on upload, but do not count on it.
- Is it going on your own website? Files are served exactly as uploaded, so clean them first.
- Are you selling something? Buyers do not need to know where you live.
How to check a photo yourself
You can see some of this data without any tool. On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties and open the Details tab, where you will find the camera, the date and, if present, the GPS coordinates. On a Mac, open the picture in Preview, choose Tools, then Show Inspector, and look at the info tabs. On a phone, most gallery apps show the location in a details panel. Checking a photo you are about to share takes a few seconds, and it is a good way to learn what your own phone records.
What a clean file still gives away
Removing the hidden data does not hide what the picture shows. A street sign, a house number, a car registration, a school uniform or a reflection in a window can identify a place just as well as coordinates. Before you post, look at the picture itself with a stranger’s eyes. If something in it would let a person find you, crop it out or choose a different photo.
Not all metadata is the enemy
Photographers and archivists value EXIF data: it records the camera settings, the lens and the date, which helps when sorting a library or learning from past shots. Keep your own originals with the data intact, and create cleaned copies only for sharing. This tool never changes the file you add, so the original stays as it is, and you simply download a second, clean copy.
For website owners: what happens to uploads
When you upload a photo to a website, the original file is normally kept exactly as it was, hidden data included, unless a plugin or your hosting setup removes it. That means a photo with your office coordinates can sit publicly in your media library for anyone to download. If you run a site, clean images before you upload them, especially photos of your home, your premises or your team. It takes seconds here, and the pictures look exactly the same.
Stop recording location at the source
On most phones you can turn off location access for the camera app in the privacy settings. You can still add a location to chosen photos later. Combine this with the image compressor and the watermark tool when you prepare photos for publication.
FAQ
No. For JPG, PNG and WebP the pixels are not changed.
Add it above. If GPS data is present, the summary says so and you can open the coordinates on a map.
Usually not, but they can carry other details such as the software that made them.
No. You download a separate clean copy and the original stays untouched.
No. The file is read in your browser.