Metadata

Metadata reads the EXIF, XMP and IPTC tags stored inside a photo — the camera and lens, the exposure settings, the date it was taken and often the GPS coordinates — and writes a clean copy with none of them. The file is parsed in your own tab and never uploaded, which matters more here than anywhere else on the site, because the coordinates in a phone photo are accurate to a few metres. Stripping works by decoding the image to pixels and encoding it again: a canvas holds colour and nothing else, so no tag survives the round trip.

How it works

  1. Drop a photo One file at a time. Photos from a phone or a camera carry the most; screenshots and exported graphics usually carry nothing at all.
  2. Read the tags What is found is grouped under Camera, Exposure, Image, Date and Location, with everything the sections did not claim listed alphabetically under Other. Binary blocks such as maker notes and embedded thumbnails are reported by size rather than printed as thousands of bytes.
  3. Check the location warning If the file records latitude and longitude, a warning shows both to six decimal places. No map is drawn: fetching one would send your coordinates to somebody else's server, and nothing here leaves your machine.
  4. Save a clean copy Press Strip metadata and download. The image is decoded and re-encoded from its pixels alone, and the file arrives named after the original with -clean on the end.

Questions

Does renaming or resaving a file remove its EXIF data?
Renaming does nothing at all, because the tags live inside the file rather than in its name. Removing them takes a re-encode of the pixels, which is what the strip button does: the image is drawn onto a canvas, which stores colour and nothing else, and written out again, so the camera, date and GPS block cannot come through.
What does the clean copy lose apart from the metadata?
Some quality, if the source was lossy. The clean copy is re-encoded at quality 0.95, so a JPEG in means a JPEG that has been through an encoder a second time out. PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF and BMP are written back in their own format; anything else is written as PNG.
Can it read a PDF, an SVG or a HEIC file?
PDF and SVG are turned away by name, because this tool reads the EXIF, XMP and IPTC tag blocks inside photos and neither container carries them. HEIC is a partial case: outside Safari the preview will not draw because the browser cannot decode the pixels, but the tags themselves are still read and listed.

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