Remove EXIF from an image

Strip GPS and EXIF metadata from photos

A photo looks like a picture. The file is also a short report: where you were standing, what phone you used, when you pressed the shutter, sometimes even a serial number. That bundle is called EXIF. It is useful in your own catalog. It is a poor plus-one for a public blog, a product page, or a press kit.

To remove EXIF from an image, you do not need a desktop suite. Drop the file here. We draw the pixels and save a new file. Location, camera model, and the rest of the metadata stay on the original, which never left your computer.

Remove GPS location from phone photos

Phones have been writing coordinates into camera-roll JPEGs for years. You take a picture of a cake. The file also knows the kitchen. Share that on a site that does not strip metadata, and a determined stranger with a free EXIF reader can put a pin on a map. Most people will never bother. The one who does only needs to be lucky once.

This is not a thought experiment. In 2012, a magazine published a photo of John McAfee. The image still had a geotag. It placed him in Guatemala. He was trying not to be found. The picture did the finding. You are probably not on the run. You also do not need your home address riding along with a listing photo.

Instagram and Facebook usually strip this on upload. WordPress, a marketplace, an email to a journalist, a ZIP of "web-ready" assets - those often pass the file through like a polite courier. If you are the last person to touch it, strip it here.

What EXIF, IPTC, and XMP this tool removes

Strip image metadata here means: new pixels, empty wrapper. Gone with the download:

• GPS / location
• Camera make, model, and lens
• Shutter, ISO, and the rest of the capture notes
• The embedded EXIF thumbnail
• IPTC captions and XMP bags that lived in the original file

What it does not do: it will not blur a street sign in the pixels. It will not redact a name that is in the photograph. Metadata is the hidden label. The picture is still the picture. If you need faces or documents unreadable, that is blur, not this page.

JPEG to JPEG is not lossless. Quality 90 is the default so you are not paying a visible tax for a privacy pass. PNG to PNG is a new PNG of the same pixels. If a lab needs a bit-exact original with only the GPS header rewritten, use a dedicated EXIF editor. This is the practical wipe you run before you hit publish.

When to remove EXIF vs compress or resize

1. Keep the camera original in a private folder. That file can still have GPS. You may want it later for your own records.
2. Remove EXIF from the copy you are about to publish.
3. If the photo is also too large for the page, resize it, then compress. Canvas compress already drops EXIF, so this page is for when metadata is the whole job.
4. Check one download if the batch matters. Then replace the public file, not the master.

User-generated uploads on a product you ship should be stripped in your own pipeline. Asking every customer to visit a website is not a security control. Use this when you are about to publish a file you did not encode.

Download names: -no-exif vs the original

Each file is saved as your-photo-no-exif.jpg (or PNG, or WebP). That is deliberate. Overwriting the only copy of a shoot because a download dialog said "yes" is a very specific kind of afternoon. The original stays where you left it. The clean one is named so you can tell them apart in a folder at 1 a.m.

HTML for a photo with EXIF removed

After the download, the HTML does not need extra attributes for metadata. It needs an honest src and alt. If you want to be sure the public copy is the -no-exif one, put that in the path.

<img src="/media/listing-no-exif.jpg"
     alt="Product on a table"
     width="1600" height="1067">

masters/listing.jpg              <- GPS may still be here
public/listing-no-exif.jpg       <- the file the site serves