Remove metadata from a photo
First see what is actually in there. Then remove it, and see that it has gone.
JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF and BMP. Your file is processed on your device.
How do I remove EXIF data from a photo?
Why this tool shows you the data first
Removing metadata is, technically, trivial. Every image FileBelow produces is encoded fresh from pixels, so nothing from the original container survives — that is true of the compressor and the resizer as much as of this page.
Which makes “we removed your metadata” a worthless thing to be told. You cannot see metadata. You could not see it before and you cannot see that it has gone, so the claim is unfalsifiable and every site in this category makes it.
So this page works the other way round. It reads your file and shows you what is actually in there — the camera, the date, the serial number, the coordinates — before anything happens. Then it removes it. Then it reads the finished file again and tells you what went. The claim ends up resting on something you can check.
What a photograph can be carrying
Where it was taken. If location services were on, most phones record latitude and longitude to within a few metres. This is the field that matters. A photo of something for sale, taken at home, carries your address to anyone who opens the file properly.
Which device took it. Make and model, and on many cameras a body serial number and a lens serial number. Those tie a set of photographs together as having come from the same camera, whoever posted them.
When. The original capture time, usually to the second, and often separately from the file’s modification date — so a photograph presented as recent can be dated.
Who edited it, and how. Software names, an artist or copyright field, and on files that have been through a professional editor, an XMP block that can contain a surprising amount of history.
A second copy of the picture. Many cameras embed a small thumbnail. In some editors it survives cropping, which has historically meant a cropped-out part of an image remaining visible in the file’s own preview.
Not all metadata is a problem
A colour profile tells software how to interpret the file’s colours, and removing it can make a photograph look flat or oversaturated on a wide-gamut screen. The orientation tag is what keeps a photo the right way up. The JFIF header holds the print resolution.
None of those identify you, and the page marks the ones that do rather than presenting an undifferentiated list. A file with a colour profile and nothing else is not a privacy problem, and saying so is more useful than alarming you about it.
The other steps before publishing
Removing metadata is one of three things worth doing to a photograph that is about to go somewhere public. The others are marking it, if attribution matters, and publishing it at a sensible size — a 6000-pixel original posted publicly is a print-quality file given away for nothing.
What EXIF data is covers every field a camera can write and which of them actually identify you, and what FileBelow does with your files explains why this page can read your photo without it going anywhere.
The one thing to understand about how this works
FileBelow does not delete the metadata from your file. It decodes your image to pixels and writes a new file from those pixels, and the new file was never given any metadata to begin with. That distinction matters: there is no block left behind that a more thorough parser might find, because there is no copy of the original container in the output at all.
Your original file, meanwhile, is untouched — on your device, with its metadata intact. Nothing here modifies what you already have; you download a second, clean copy. If the point of the exercise is that the original should stop existing, deleting it is a step you have to take yourself.
Common questions
- Does removing EXIF change how my photo looks?
- The pixels are re-encoded, so a JPEG loses a small amount of information the way it does on any save. FileBelow uses a high quality setting for this specifically, so the difference is not visible. What does change is the orientation: because the tag is gone, the correct rotation is written into the pixels instead, which means the photo now looks the same in software that reads tags and software that does not.
- Does this really remove the GPS location?
- Yes, and you do not have to take our word for it. The finished file is read back with the same parser that read the original, and the result is shown to you: which blocks went, and whether the coordinates are gone. That is deliberate — a tool that says "metadata removed" and shows you nothing is asking for trust it has not earned.
- Do social networks not strip this anyway?
- The large ones generally do strip EXIF when they process an upload, though what exactly they remove and keep is their decision and it changes. But posting is not the only way a photo travels. Attaching it to an email, sending it through a messaging app that preserves the original, uploading it to a forum, a marketplace listing, a cloud folder or a job application — all of those can pass the file through untouched, coordinates included.
- My photo has no metadata at all. Why?
- Most likely it has already been through something that stripped it — downloaded from a social network, screenshotted, or exported by an app that does not write EXIF. Screenshots in particular almost never carry any. The page says so plainly rather than implying it saved you from something, because a tool that reports a dramatic result on an empty file is not a tool you can rely on for the ones that matter.
- Which formats can it read metadata from?
- JPEG, PNG and WebP. HEIC files from an iPhone are opened and re-encoded — so the output carries no metadata either way — but the original’s metadata blocks are not listed, because reading them means parsing the HEIF container rather than the small header this tool inspects. Whatever it can or cannot show you, the output is always a fresh encode from pixels.