The invisible information in your photos
Photos from a phone or digital camera carry extra data called Exif alongside the picture: when it was taken, the camera model and, if location is switched on, the latitude and longitude where you took it.
Many social networks strip location data when you post, but not every service or every way of sending does. Email attachments, file-sharing services, blog uploads and chat apps’ “send original quality” options can deliver the original file untouched. A photo taken at home could reveal where you live.
Here is how to use this site’s tools, step by step, to get a photo ready to share safely.
Steps
1. See what is inside
Load the photo into the EXIF Metadata Viewer to list the date, camera model, location and more. If a location shows up, posting the file as is would reveal where it was taken.
2. Crop out what is in the picture
Removing Exif does not remove what the photo shows. Look for nameplates and addresses, the view from a window, station signs, mail, or personal details on a screen. If you find any, crop them out with Image Crop.
This site’s pixelate and blur tools apply to the whole image. To hide just one area, cropping it out is the reliable option.
3. Resize
Phone photos are often more than 4,000 pixels on the long side. For viewing on the web or social media, 1,920–2,048 pixels is plenty. With Image Resize, shrinking a 4032 × 3024 photo to 2048 × 1536 cuts the pixel count to about a quarter.
4. Choose a quality and save
Save with Image Compressor at JPEG quality 70–85%. In our JPEG quality measurements, a 1920 × 1200 landscape came out at about 130 KB at quality 80% with almost no visible difference.
5. Check again
Load the saved image into the EXIF Metadata Viewer again. If no Exif is found, the location is gone too. To remove only the metadata without steps 2–4, use the EXIF/Metadata Stripper.
What we verified: every tool removes Exif
All of this site’s image tools draw the image onto a browser canvas and export only what it looks like as a new file. So running a photo through any one of resize, compress or crop should remove Exif, not just the stripper tool. We checked.
We made a test JPEG carrying a camera model, a date, an orientation (rotate 90°) and a location (the latitude and longitude of Tokyo Tower), exported it the same way the tools do (canvas in Chromium 152), and looked for Exif in each output.
| Processing | Output size | Format | Exif incl. location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Original | 280 × 175 | JPEG | Present |
| Resize (50%) | 87 × 140 | JPEG | Gone |
| Compress (quality 70%) | 175 × 280 | JPEG | Gone |
| Crop | 100 × 100 | JPEG | Gone |
| Save as PNG | 175 × 280 | PNG | Gone |
| Save as WebP | 175 × 280 | WebP | Gone |
- No output kept any Exif, including the PNG and WebP versions.
- The original was 280 wide × 175 tall with a “rotate 90° to display” orientation tag. Every output came out portrait (175 × 280): even though the orientation tag is gone, the photo is saved the right way up, because the browser applies the orientation before drawing.
- The outputs carried only a colour reference (an sRGB colour profile). The original photo’s colour profile is not carried over, so photos taken in a wide colour gamut may shift slightly in colour.
Things to watch
- iPhone HEIC photos cannot be opened in some browsers. Setting iPhone “Settings → Camera → Formats” to “Most Compatible” saves JPEGs instead.
- Keep the original photo. Redoing work from an already resized or compressed copy lowers the quality each time.
- Everything runs in your browser; your photos are never sent to this site’s server.