EXIF Viewer and Remover

Photos carry a full set of details you may not expect: camera make and model, body serial, lens serial, the time down to the second, software, author, copyright and, most of all, GPS latitude and longitude. Originals exported from a phone gallery can be accurate to six decimal places, enough to identify a building and a unit. Before posting to social media, sending a CV or uploading for moderation, read the fields and decide what to remove.

The tool does two things: it lays the metadata out as it is, and it removes exactly the scope you select. Reading and stripping run in the browser. Images are never uploaded and no backend is involved.

What it reads

• Camera and file info: make, model, image description, author, copyright, software, modification time, orientation tag, resolution and unit
• Shooting settings: shutter time as both a fraction and seconds, aperture, exposure program, ISO, focal length and 35mm equivalent, exposure bias, metering mode, flash, white balance, color space, scene mode, lens model and lens serial, body serial, original and digitized timestamps
• Location: GPS degrees, minutes and seconds, converted decimal latitude and longitude, altitude and datum, hemisphere, GPS date, with a note on whether the coordinates come from EXIF or XMP
• Other payloads: XMP key list, ICC color profile, Photoshop image resource blocks, JPEG comments, PNG tEXt, zTXt and iTXt text chunks, GIF comment and application extension blocks, WebP EXIF, XMP and ICCP chunks
• Structural view: JPEG APP segments plus quantization and Huffman tables and scan segments, PNG chunk order, WebP RIFF chunks, GIF frames and control blocks, each listed and marked as removed or rewritten so the scope is visible
• Embedded thumbnail: the JPEG thumbnail stored inside EXIF is extracted and shown; many people do not know a second smaller copy of the image travels in the file
• Maker notes: vendor-specific layouts differ, so the tool reports size and position instead of guessing and giving a wrong conclusion

Two removal modes with very different results

• Strip everything: remove EXIF, XMP and comments from the file. Pixel data is not touched, so quality, dimensions and color stay identical and the file simply gets smaller
• Remove location only: rewrite the EXIF in place following the TIFF structure, dropping the GPS subdirectory and the pointer to it while keeping shutter, aperture, ISO, camera model, time and serials. Useful when a portfolio needs its settings but must not reveal where it was shot
• Selectable scope: XMP and JPEG comments are removed by default, Photoshop data and the ICC profile are kept by default. The ICC profile defines how the colors should be interpreted, and removing it can shift colors on another display, so it is not part of the default strip
• Apply orientation: this option re-encodes through a canvas so the rotation is baked into the pixels and all metadata is dropped. Quality is compressed again and ICC, orientation and thumbnail are lost

Batch workflow

• Drag in or select several files; the thumbnail strip lets you switch between them or show only images with location data
• Download current image (cleaned) saves one file; Download all as ZIP exports every result at once
• Copy current image info exports a plain text report with group headings, tag numbers and values, ready to archive or share for checking
• Load sample photo provides an image with full GPS, XMP, ICC, comments and maker data, so you can try the tool without your own files
• File suffixes follow the mode: cleaned, location removed or upright, with the original extension and letter case preserved

Where metadata lives

FAQ

• Does stripping EXIF reduce quality? No in lossless mode. The tool removes metadata segments and copies the compressed pixel data byte for byte, so dimensions, color and sharpness stay the same. Quality drops only when Apply orientation is selected, because that path re-encodes the image
• Why is the photo sideways after removing EXIF? A phone held upright often stores pixels in landscape and relies on the orientation tag to tell the viewer to rotate 90 degrees. Once the metadata is gone, that hint is gone. Apply orientation first, or use the rotate tool to bake the angle in before stripping
• Can I remove only the location and keep everything else? Yes, use Remove location only. It rewrites the TIFF structure, drops the GPS subdirectory and keeps every other tag, then reports how many location tags were removed and how many bytes were saved
• Is rounding coordinates to two decimals safe? No. Removing the whole tag set is the reliable option; coarsened coordinates still narrow a location to a residential area within tens of kilometers. The tool removes the entire block and also clears GPS fields in XMP
• Do social platforms keep EXIF? Most re-compress uploads on the server and drop most metadata, but this is not guaranteed. Sending the original as a file attachment, or using certain mini app channels, can preserve it. Cleaning the file yourself is safer than trusting the platform
• Why keep the ICC profile by default? It explains how the colors in this image should be interpreted. Without it, the same file can look shifted or flat on another display. Keep it unless you are sure it is redundant
• How many files can I process at once? Browser memory is the limit, and a few hundred files usually work. The ZIP export stores files without compression and refuses a single archive near 4GB, asking you to split the batch
• Are images uploaded? No. Reading, parsing, rewriting and packing all happen in browser memory, the page sends no requests and a refresh clears everything
• Can I see where someone else took a photo? If they sent the original and the camera recorded location, yes. That is exactly why you should check your own files first. Images with coordinates are marked in the list for quick review

For basic file attributes without metadata parsing, use the file info reader. To shrink files after stripping, use the image compressor; to change the container, use the image converter; for angle fixes, use the rotate and crop tools; to cover visible content, use the mosaic tool.