Take the GPS, the camera and the date out of a photo

A phone photo remembers where it was taken, on what, and when. Drop it here and get the same picture back with none of that. It never leaves your device, which on this tool of all tools is the whole point.

Drop your photo here

or click to browse. JPG, PNG, WebP and iPhone HEIC. The picture never leaves your device — which is rather the point of this one.

It tells you what it found

Named, one by one, from your actual file — not a promise that something was probably removed.

It checks itself

The copy you download is read back before you get it, and what is left is reported.

It stays the right way up

The rotation is put into the pixels before the flag holding it is deleted.

It never leaves the tab

No upload, no server, no log. The location you are hiding is not sent to anyone to be hidden.

What a photo remembers about you

A picture taken on a phone carries a block of EXIF alongside the pixels. Typically that is the exact coordinates it was taken at, the make and model of the device, the lens, the shutter speed, the date and time to the second, whatever software last saved it, and a small thumbnail. Some editors add an XMP block with an editing history on top of that. None of it is visible when you look at the picture, and all of it travels with the file when you post it.

The coordinates are the sharp end. A photo of something ordinary, posted publicly, can carry the address it was taken at to within a few metres.

How this removes it

The picture is decoded and drawn onto a canvas, then written out again. A canvas holds pixels and a size and nothing else, so nothing that was attached to the file has anywhere to survive. That is a structural property rather than a list of fields being deleted one by one, which is what makes it hard to get wrong. What the browser then writes back into a JPEG is a standard sRGB colour profile — identical on every picture, there to keep the colours right, and named on screen so the accounting is complete.

The step that matters is the decode. Doing it through the browser’s own image path means the rotation recorded in the EXIF is applied on the way in, so a portrait photo is genuinely portrait by the time the flag describing it is discarded. Reading the raw pixels instead would be faster and would hand back a sideways photo — the exact bug that makes a stripper like this useless.

Then the copy is read back and checked. Everything the widget lists as gone was found in your file and looked for again in the output.

Where this stops

The file is rewritten, not edited. A JPG is compressed once more at a high quality setting. There is a lossless way to do this for some files, and this is not it — the trade buys correct rotation on every format including HEIC.

It cannot list what is inside a HEIC. An iPhone HEIC is converted to JPG and comes out clean, but the “here is what was in it” report only works for JPG, PNG and WebP. Rather than claim otherwise, it says it could not read it.

It does not touch what is in the picture. A street sign, a face or a screen full of an address is still there. That is the mosaic tool.

It is not a compressor. The size may go down, and occasionally up. For a target size, use the image compressor — which, being the same canvas path, also drops the metadata.

Things worth asking

How do I know it actually worked?

The tool reads the file it is about to give you and reports what is left, rather than telling you it went well. What it lists as gone, it found in your original and could not find in the copy. If your photo had nothing hidden in it to begin with, it says that too instead of claiming a cleanup it did not perform.

Will my photo come back rotated?

No, and this is the failure worth naming. A phone stores portrait photos as landscape plus a rotation flag in the EXIF — the very data being deleted. A tool that strips the flag without applying it hands you a picture on its side. This one decodes through the browser’s own image path, which applies the rotation first, so the correct orientation ends up in the pixels before the flag is thrown away.

Does the picture lose quality?

A JPG is compressed once more, at a high setting, because the file is genuinely rewritten rather than edited in place. On a photo you cannot see it; on an image that has already been through a dozen saves it is one more. PNG is lossless and loses nothing at all.

What exactly gets removed?

Everything that identifies anything: GPS coordinates, camera make and model, lens, exposure settings, the date and time, the software that last touched it, XMP and IPTC blocks, editing history, the embedded thumbnail, and any comment. One thing does come back — the browser writes a standard sRGB colour profile into the JPEGs it encodes. It is the same few hundred bytes on every picture from every device, it is what keeps the colours right, and it says nothing about you. The widget names it rather than pretending it is not there.

Why did the file get bigger?

Occasionally it does. A photo already saved at a lower quality than this tool writes at will grow when it is written again at a higher one. The metadata is still gone; if size is what you are after, run the result through the image compressor.

Is the photo uploaded to check it?

No. Nothing about the picture leaves the tab — not the file, not the coordinates, not the camera name. On a tool whose entire purpose is privacy, sending the file to a server to have its privacy improved would be an odd thing to do.

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