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A photo is two things in one file
What you see is the picture. What travels with it is a bundle of notes written by your camera, your phone and every app that opened the file afterwards. The notes are not shown in a gallery, so most people never think about them, yet whoever receives the original file can read them in seconds with free software.
These are the notes you are most likely to be carrying right now.
| Layer | What it records | What a stranger can do with it |
|---|---|---|
| EXIF | Make and model, lens, shutter and ISO, orientation, the exact moment of capture | Match photos to one device and rebuild your daily routine from timestamps |
| GPS tags | Latitude, longitude, altitude, and on some phones direction and speed | Open a map link and land on your front door |
| Maker notes | Vendor-specific blocks, often with body and lens serial numbers | Prove two files came from the same physical camera |
| XMP | Edit history, the app that exported the file, ratings, keywords, sometimes a creator name | See which software chain produced an image |
| IPTC | Caption, credit, copyright line, contact details | Read a real name, e-mail address or phone number typed by a photographer |
| Embedded preview | A small copy of the picture kept for fast previews | Some editors forget to refresh it after a crop, so the uncropped scene survives |
| Trailing data | Comments and vendor blobs appended after the image ends | Carry live-photo video and other extras you never meant to send |
| AI records | Prompts, seeds, node graphs, signed Content Credentials | Reveal how an image was generated, and with which tool |
Who should clean before sending
- Anyone selling second-hand things. The sofa photographed in your living room can quietly include your address.
- Parents and teachers passing pictures of children around clubs, classes and group chats.
- Freelancers and agencies who hand files to clients and would rather not expose their camera, software or studio setup.
- Landlords, estate agents and hosts whose listing photos could pin down a vacant property or a tenant’s flat.
- People with a reason to stay hidden: reporters and their sources, activists, anyone avoiding an ex-partner.
- Webmasters. A public file with a GPS block hands your location to every visitor who downloads it.
The pattern behind most incidents is the same: a person shares a file they assumed was “just a picture”, and a recipient or a scraper reads the notes. It rarely takes more than the properties dialog of a normal operating system.
Step by step: check, clean, verify
- Drop your photos onto the box at the top, pick them with the file button, or paste straight from the clipboard.
- Press Clean. Each picture is handled inside your browser, so a big batch starts at once instead of queuing behind an upload.
- Open the report. Every field that was found is listed, with location, device, owner and AI fields marked so they are hard to miss. A second scan counts what remains.
- Trust the badge only at zero. A file is called verified clean when that second scan finds nothing left to report.
- Download single files or one .zip. Rename them while you are there.
What actually leaves the file, format by format
JPG and JPEG
EXIF with its GPS and maker notes, XMP, IPTC, comments, embedded previews, secondary pictures used by multi-picture files, and any bytes after the end of the image are cut. Baseline and progressive files are both handled.
PNG
Text chunks (where many generators store prompts), the EXIF chunk, the modification time and Content Credentials are dropped. Animated PNG keeps all its frames.
WebP
The EXIF, XMP and C2PA chunks go, together with the header flags that announce them. Animated WebP is kept intact.
AVIF
AVIF pictures are redrawn in the browser and saved again, which leaves no trace of the original metadata. This is the one format in this group where the bytes are not identical afterwards.
What is deliberately kept: the pixels, the colour profile (so tones do not shift) and, for JPEG, a tiny block that holds nothing except the rotation, because phone photos are usually stored sideways with a flag that turns them upright.
Why the picture does not get worse
Re-saving a JPEG in an editor decodes and compresses the pixels again, and each round costs a little detail. Removing notes does not require that. A JPEG is a chain of labelled segments, so the cleaner walks the chain, copies the segments the picture needs, skips the rest and never decodes the compressed image data.
- The compressed data is copied byte for byte. Our own tests compare the decoded pixels of the original and the cleaned file and require them to be identical.
- Progressive scans and restart markers pass through unchanged.
- A cleaned file is never padded and is normally a little smaller than the original.
If you actually want a lighter file, switch the output format or disable “Preserve original quality”. The picture is then re-encoded on purpose.
Where it is safe to skip cleaning, and where it is not
Big social networks generally publish a re-saved copy without location and most EXIF, but they still receive your original. Everything else tends to hand the file on as it is.
| Route | Typical behaviour | Skip cleaning? |
|---|---|---|
| Large social networks | Public copy stripped of location and most EXIF; platform keeps the original | Usually, if you trust the platform |
| Chat apps, photo mode | Image is recompressed and most metadata dropped | Often, but it differs per app |
| Chat apps, file or document mode | Original delivered untouched | No |
| E-mail attachments, cloud links, USB sticks | Original travels as it is | No |
| Forums, blogs, classifieds, your own CMS | Many store and serve the original upload | No |
Built-in tricks, and why they are not enough on their own
Every major system can remove the location of a single picture. Handy, but limited to GPS and awkward for a folder.
- iPhone: in the share sheet tap Options and turn Location off. To stop recording it, open Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera, and choose Never.
- Android: disable location tags in the camera settings; Samsung Gallery offers “Remove location data” while sharing.
- Windows: right-click the file, Properties, Details, then “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.
- Mac: open the file in Preview, Tools, Show Inspector, GPS tab, “Remove Location Info”.
None of these show you the other layers, none handle a whole folder quickly, and none know about AI generation records or Content Credentials. A report plus a second scan answers the question “is it really gone?”. If location is all you care about, the GPS location remover shows the coordinates and takes out only those.
Before you post: five habits
- Clean, then read the report. Pay attention to the location and device lines.
- Look at the picture like a stranger would. House numbers, street signs, number plates, a recognisable skyline in a window, a reflection in glasses can all name a place.
- Rename the file.
garden-flat-9-elm-road.jpgleaks on its own. - Keep the original in a private folder for your records, including date, location and any Content Credentials.
- Check the live result. Download your own post and open it in a viewer.
Typical situations
| You are… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Posting a classified ad | Clean and rename the photos. Whatever location you mention in the text is then your decision, not the file’s. |
| Entering a contest or sending to a stock library | Read the rules first: some demand capture date and camera, others forbid identifying data. Keep the untouched original ready. |
| Publishing on your own website | Clean before upload. Metadata adds weight and tells every visitor where you were. |
| Delivering work to a client | Agree what they should receive; a clean delivery copy plus an archived original is the common answer. |
| Sharing a family picture with a big group | Send it as a photo, not a file, or clean it first when the group includes people you hardly know. |
File types at a glance
| Type | Method | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| JPG / JPEG | Lossless removal | Baseline and progressive; rotation preserved |
| PNG | Lossless removal | Removes text chunks, EXIF, timestamps and Content Credentials; animation kept |
| WebP | Lossless removal | Removes EXIF, XMP and C2PA chunks; animation kept |
| AVIF | Redraw and re-encode | Metadata gone, bytes differ |
| HEIC / HEIF | Not handled here | Export to JPEG first (iPhone: Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible) |
| GIF, TIFF, BMP | Not handled here | Camera TIFF and RAW go through the RAW tool |
Prove it with a second opinion
The built-in report uses our own scanner, so confirming with a different one is good practice. The EXIF viewer also runs in the browser, and ExifTool is the reference on a desktop computer:
exiftool -a -G1 -s photo-clean.jpgWhen one photo becomes a thousand
Guests clean 1 file at a time, up to 25 MB each and 50 images or PDFs a day. A free account raises that to 5 at a time, 25 MB and 500 a day. Starter, Pro and Business lift the daily cap and allow 25, 100 and 500 files at once. For folders and scheduled work, the API and the MCP server clean images without a browser, and the guide on cleaning many files at once explains which route fits which job.
Pictures made by AI
Generated images carry everything above plus a record of how they were made: a prompt stored as text, an XMP field naming the generator, or a signed Content Credentials manifest. The same lossless step removes all of it, and the report names each field. The AI image metadata remover page goes through the individual generators.
Questions people ask
Will cleaning make my photo look worse?
No. For JPG, PNG and WebP the compressed pixel data is copied unchanged. Only AVIF, or a format you convert to on purpose, is re-encoded.
Does my photo leave my computer?
No. Images are processed inside your browser. Open the network panel of your browser while cleaning and you will see that no request carries the picture.
Is GPS location really gone afterwards?
Yes. Latitude, longitude, altitude, speed and direction live in the EXIF block, which is removed. The report highlights location fields so you can watch them disappear.
Will portrait photos stay upright?
Yes. JPEGs keep a minimal block that stores only the rotation. PNG and WebP files with a rotation flag are redrawn in the right orientation.
Don’t social networks do this already?
Many hide location in the copy they display, yet they still keep your original, and e-mail, file-mode chats, forums and cloud links forward the file untouched. Cleaning first is the safer habit.
Is the shooting date removed too?
Dates in EXIF, XMP and IPTC are removed. Your operating system keeps its own created and modified times, and the cleaned copy is stamped with today. If the file name contains a date, rename it.
What happens to my copyright line?
It is metadata, so it goes with the rest. To keep authorship visible, put a credit in the caption, add a watermark, or write the notice back in your editor after cleaning.
Can I clean HEIC pictures from an iPhone?
Not on this page. Share the photo as JPEG, export it from Photos, or set the camera to Most Compatible, then clean the JPEG.
Could someone still find out where the picture was taken?
Not from the file. From the picture itself, maybe: landmarks, signs, reflections and window views give places away, and reverse image search can match a photo to its source. Metadata removal covers the hidden part only.
EXIF, IPTC, XMP: what is the difference?
EXIF is written by the camera and holds technical data plus GPS. IPTC is a set of descriptive fields (caption, credit, copyright) filled in by people and agencies. XMP is Adobe’s flexible XML container that can hold both plus an editing history. All three are removed.