Photo Metadata Remover

"Photo metadata" is really three standards that grew up separately and now share the same file. A single JPEG can carry all three at once, in different places, written by different programs.

The fields overlap heavily. Date, caption, copyright, creator and location exist in at least two of the three, which is why two apps can disagree about the same photo: Adobe software trusts XMP first, camera and forensic tools trust EXIF. It is also why a cheap metadata remover can look successful while leaving a block untouched — it cleared the standard it knew about. This page names every block it found so you can see what was there.

Lightroom and similar editors sometimes keep XMP in a separate sidecar file with an .xmp extension sitting beside the photo. Cleaning the JPEG never touches that file. If you are sending a folder, check for stray sidecars before you zip it.

Anything that recompresses your picture tends to lose the tags along the way. Anything that moves the file intact keeps every one of them.

Treat that table as a starting point, not a guarantee. Platforms change how they process uploads without telling anyone, behaviour differs between the app and the website, and a platform dropping metadata for other users does not mean it never read the file. The only version you can be sure about is the one you cleaned yourself before sending — download a copy of what you posted and run it through the viewer above if you want to know.

Pictures made by ChatGPT, Gemini, Firefly, Copilot and Midjourney usually ship with more than EXIF. They carry a C2PA manifest — Content Credentials — which is a signed record naming the tool that made the image and when. Some also set the IPTC field DigitalSourceType to trainedAlgorithmicMedia, a value that means exactly what it sounds like, and generation parameters such as the prompt or seed can end up in the file too. Those are the markers that trigger "made with AI" labels on several platforms.

A C2PA manifest lives in its own container, not in the EXIF block, so the byte-for-byte clean on this page is not aimed at it. Use the re-encode button for that: it redraws the picture through a canvas and writes a fresh file from the pixels alone, which carries no manifest and no tags of any kind. The cost is one round of re-compression.

What no metadata tool can remove is a watermark written into the pixels. Google's SynthID works that way, and it survives stripping, screenshots, cropping and re-compression. Patterns left in the pixel noise by one model or another are also readable by classifiers that never look at metadata at all. So removing the manifest makes a file quieter, not anonymous — and the honest use of that is keeping your camera and location out of shared photos, not passing off generated pictures as photographs.

A phone photo is not just an image. Take one in your kitchen with location services on and the file records the latitude and longitude of your kitchen, the minute you pressed the shutter, and which phone you own. Post it in a forum, attach it to a marketplace listing, or send it as a file attachment and all of that goes with it.

Instagram, Facebook and X recompress what you upload, which lulls people into thinking metadata is always removed. It is not. Email attachments, "send as document", cloud links, personal blogs and classified ads usually keep the original file whole, and a marketplace listing photo taken at home points at your front door with metre-level accuracy.

Beyond location, the tags say a lot about you: the camera model hints at your budget, the software field shows which editor you use, the timestamp shows when you are awake, and a matching serial number can tie two anonymous accounts to the same device.

None of this needs an attacker with skills. Reading the tags takes one right-click, and the tools that map a batch of photos onto a timeline are free. The fix is just as cheap: clear the tags before the file goes anywhere.

Renaming the file. The name is not the metadata. A photo called holiday.jpg still knows the beach it was taken on.

Cropping or editing on a phone. Cropping out the house number leaves the GPS tags exactly where they were, and the edit often adds a new software field naming the app you used.

Clearing only the location. The iOS share sheet toggle, the Preview button on a Mac and the Google Photos option all remove coordinates and stop there. Camera model, serial number, date and editing history stay put — enough to tie several anonymous posts to one device.

Trusting a blank Details tab. Windows shows the fields it knows. A file with no readable EXIF can still carry XMP or IPTC blocks, which is why this page lists the blocks it found by name even when the tag table is empty.

Cleaning the copy instead of the original.Strip the file before it is shared, uploaded or backed up. Once it is in a cloud folder or someone's inbox, the tagged version exists somewhere you no longer control.

Forgetting what the picture itself shows. This page removes the data written inside the file. It cannot remove a street sign, a house number, a school uniform or a reflection in a window. Read the photo as carefully as its tags.