If you publish photographs on a website, every image file is public. Anyone can download it and read its metadata. A photo from a phone may include the location where your shop is run from home, and editor tags can add kilobytes to each file.
Why clean images before upload
- Privacy: removes GPS, device and owner details of whoever took the picture.
- Size: XMP and embedded thumbnails can add noticeable weight, especially on many small images.
- Consistency: every image on the site has the same, minimal set of tags.
What to keep
Keep the colour profile so colours render the same, and the rotation so pictures stay upright. The cleaner here copies the compressed picture without recompression and keeps both. If you need copyright shown to search engines, add it with the EXIF Editor or in your page markup.
How to do it
- Export your final images from your editor.
- Drop the whole set into the Image Metadata Remover. JPEG, PNG and WebP are cleaned in your browser, and many files can be processed at once.
- For AVIF images use the AVIF Metadata Remover.
- Upload the cleaned files and check a live one in the EXIF Viewer.
Automate it
If images arrive through a pipeline, call the API in your build or upload step and fail the job if a flagged field remains.