One field matters more than all the others
A photo from a phone carries a small pile of technical trivia: shutter speed, aperture, focal length, white balance. None of it is interesting to anyone. Then there is one field that is different in kind — the GPS tag, which records latitude and longitude to roughly a few metres. Not the neighbourhood. The building.
Alongside it sit the capture timestamp, accurate to the second, and the phone make and model. Individually those look harmless. Together with coordinates they describe where someone was, when they were there, and what device they carry. That is why this tool shows you the data before it removes it: the abstract phrase “image metadata” convinces nobody, and a map pin on your own front door convinces everybody.
Where it gets stripped and where it survives
The common assumption is that this problem was solved years ago by the platforms. Partly true, and the exceptions are the ones that catch people out.
| Where the photo goes | Metadata |
|---|---|
| Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok | Stripped on upload |
| Email or chat attachment | Kept — sent as-is |
| Messaging app “send as document/file” | Kept — that is the point of the option |
| Marketplace and classified listings | Varies by site, often kept |
| Forums, wikis, personal sites | Usually kept |
| Shared cloud folder or drive link | Kept — it is the original file |
The classic case is selling something second-hand. The photos were taken at home, the listing is public, and the coordinates come along for the ride. Second most common: sending a photo to someone as a file rather than as an image, precisely because you wanted the full quality version — which is also the version with everything still attached.
Removing it without turning the photo sideways
Orientation is stored in EXIF too, as a rotation tag rather than in the pixels themselves. Phones almost always shoot in one physical direction and record how the image should be turned when displayed. Delete the metadata carelessly and you delete that instruction with it, which is why photos come back from some tools lying on their side.
Here the orientation tag is read first and the rotation is applied to the actual pixels, so the finished file needs no instruction to look right. Everything else is dropped by re-encoding the image from raw pixels: metadata lives in separate segments of the file, and a freshly written file simply never contains them.
The cost of removing it
Re-encoding a JPEG recompresses it, so there is a small, one-time quality cost. At the maximum setting it is not something you will see outside of a pixel-level comparison. If you would rather not recompress at all, PNG output is lossless — at the price of a much larger file, since PNG was never designed for photographs.
You also lose the harmless parts: capture date, camera settings, any copyright field you had set. For a photo you are publishing that is usually the trade you want. For your personal archive, keep the untouched originals and clean a copy instead — the capture date is genuinely useful and there is no reason to throw it away on files nobody else sees.
Nothing is uploaded
The file is read, inspected and rewritten entirely inside your browser. It is not sent anywhere, and there is no server that could keep a copy. That matters more on this page than on any other tool here: uploading a photo to a stranger's server in order to hide where it was taken would rather defeat the purpose. Drop in a folder and every file is handled the same way, returned as one ZIP.