Remove metadata from any photo
Drop a photo below to see the location, camera, serial number and capture date stored inside it, then download a copy with all of it removed. Free, no sign-up, and nothing is uploaded — the tool runs entirely in your browser.
Your photo never leaves this tab. The frame holding the inspector is served with connect-src 'none', which tells the browser to refuse every outbound request it might make — fetch, XHR, WebSocket, beacon.
It is enforced by the browser, not by me. Open your Network tab, drop a photo, and watch nothing happen.
What your photos are carrying
A photo file is two things: the picture, and a set of notes the camera wrote about the picture. The notes are the part nobody looks at.
- Location
- Camera
- Body serial number
- Capture date
- Software
- Credit
- Keywords
- Embedded thumbnail
The coordinates are the ones people know about, and they are usually accurate to within a few metres — close enough to be a specific front door. The one worth knowing about is the body serial number: a number identifying one physical camera, written into every photo it takes. It ties photos together across accounts and years, and there is no setting to turn it off.
What this tool removes
| Format | Read | Remove | How |
|---|---|---|---|
| JPEG | Yes | Yes | Metadata segments deleted, image data untouched |
| PNG | Yes | Yes | Text and EXIF chunks deleted, pixel data untouched |
| WebP | Yes | Yes | EXIF and XMP chunks deleted from the container |
| HEIC | Yes | Not in the browser | Would require re-encoding, which changes the picture |
| TIFF | Yes | Not in the browser | Rewriting the image directory risks corrupting the file |
| GIF | Yes | Not yet | Reads metadata only |
What it keeps
The colour profile describes how to display the image accurately and says nothing about you, so it stays. So does the orientation flag — delete that and the photo comes out on its side. The tool lists what it kept and why.
Who makes this, and how it is paid for
One independent developer. There is no company behind it, no investor, and no analytics product waiting at the end of the funnel.
It can be free because it costs almost nothing to run. The reading and the stripping happen on your computer, in your browser — this site serves a few static files and never receives, processes or stores an image, so there is no per-photo bill to recover from you. That is the no-upload promise seen from the accounting side: the same fact, and the reason this one is not a free trial of something.
The intended revenue is a paid Mac app for the two jobs a browser genuinely cannot do — cleaning whole folders, and removing the download history macOS attaches to a file from outside the image. If you never need either, the free tool is the whole product. Nothing here expires, and no advertising, trackers or accounts are involved;the privacy page lists exactly what is and is not collected.
Questions
- Are my photos uploaded anywhere?
- No. The inspector runs inside a frame served with the HTTP header Content-Security-Policy: connect-src 'none', which makes your browser block every outbound network request that frame could make. You can confirm it in your browser's Network tab.
- What metadata does a photo actually contain?
- Most commonly: GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres, the camera or phone make and model, the exact date and time, the editing software used, and often the camera body serial number. Photos may also carry IPTC credit fields, an XMP packet, keywords, and an embedded thumbnail that sometimes has coordinates of its own.
- Does removing metadata reduce image quality?
- Not here. For JPEG, PNG and WebP the metadata is deleted from the file container and the compressed image data is copied across byte for byte, so the image is never decoded or re-compressed. The pixels in the clean copy are identical to the pixels in the original.
- What is a camera body serial number?
- A number identifying one physical camera, not a model. Many cameras write it into every photo they take, which means separate photos posted in separate places under separate names can be matched to the same device. Most people have never heard of it.
- Why does the tool sometimes say it could not remove the metadata?
- After stripping, the tool re-reads the file it just wrote and checks what is actually left. If anything identifying remains, it says so and does not offer the download.
- Is this really free, and what is the catch?
- It is free, with no account, no advertising and no trackers. It can be free because the work happens on your own computer: this site serves a few static files and never receives or processes an image, so there is no per-photo cost to recover from you. It is made by one independent developer, and the intended revenue is a paid Mac app for people who need to clean whole folders or remove the download history macOS stores outside the image file. Nothing is funded by selling data, because none is collected.
When the browser is the wrong tool
Nothing Personal for Mac does two things this page cannot. It reads the download history macOS attaches to a file — where you saved it from — which lives outside the image and is invisible to any browser. And it handles folders rather than a handful of files, from Finder, without opening anything.