What your photo tells on you.

Field notes

What exactly gets removed?

EXIF (GPS position, timestamps, camera make/model/serial, the embedded preview thumbnail), XMP and IPTC editor blocks, comments, and any data smuggled in after the image officially ends — phones hide whole video clips there (“motion photos”). What stays: the pixels, byte for byte, and by default the color profile so your photo doesn’t shift color. If the photo was shot rotated, the single rotation tag is written back so it still displays upright — that tag says nothing about you.

Lossless? Most tools re-save the image.

Yes — this is surgery on the file’s structure, not a re-encode. Sites that run your photo through a compressor to “clean” it cost you quality every time. Here the compressed image data is copied through untouched; only the metadata containers are cut out.

Doesn’t social media strip this anyway?

The big platforms mostly do (after reading it themselves, of course). Email, messengers, cloud drives, marketplaces, forums and your own website mostly don’t. The classic accident is selling something on a marketplace with a photo taken at home — GPS included.

Why does “in your browser” matter here?

An EXIF-removal site that has you upload the photo has, by definition, received your photo and its location data — the thing you were trying to contain. This page is a few kilobytes of JavaScript doing byte surgery locally. Disconnect from the internet after loading it if you like; it works the same.

HEIC? WebP?

Not yet. iPhone HEIC files: share or export as JPEG first (the phone does this natively), then clean here. If you need WebP or HEIC support, tell us.