Strip image metadata — remove EXIF, IPTC, XMP and GPS from photos in bulk

What metadata standards a typical photo carries

A JPEG taken on a smartphone and processed in a photo editor can carry three or four distinct metadata standards in parallel, each written by a different layer of the toolchain. They are stored in separate segments within the file and must be stripped independently — removing one does not touch the others.

What the file size comparison shows you

The before-and-after size display is not just a reassurance signal — it tells you something concrete about what the file was carrying. A JPEG with a large EXIF block, embedded XMP editing history, a full IPTC record, and an embedded thumbnail might carry 60–150 KB of metadata. A simple camera JPEG might carry 8–20 KB. The size difference after stripping reflects how much of the file was metadata rather than pixels.

If the size barely changes — say, 1 KB difference on a 3 MB file — the photo was already largely clean: perhaps it was exported from a social platform that strips metadata on ingest, or the camera was set to minimal EXIF logging. The tool strips whatever is present; a small delta just means there was little to remove.

Step-by-step: how to strip metadata with this tool

Open the tool above and either drag and drop one or more image files onto the drop zone, or click to open the file picker. The tool accepts JPEG and PNG files. Once loaded, each file shows its original size alongside a preview of the key EXIF tags found — camera model, GPS presence, software tag, capture date.

Click "Strip all metadata". The tool reads each file into a canvas element, draws the pixel data, and exports a new JPEG without any metadata header. It discards the original EXIF, IPTC, and XMP segments entirely rather than overwriting individual fields. Each exported file shows the new file size alongside the original, so you can confirm the reduction before downloading.

Download the cleaned files individually or as a ZIP. The original files on your disk are not modified — the tool only writes new files into the browser's download folder.

Six scenarios where batch metadata stripping matters

Publishing a photography portfolio: every photo in the gallery carries the camera serial number, capture time, and often a home or studio GPS coordinate. Stripping before publishing removes the device fingerprint and location history without any visual change to the images.

Selling photos via a stock library: IPTC fields may carry your name, address, and client notes from the original shoot. The stock platform will add its own rights metadata at upload. Running a batch strip beforehand means only your chosen metadata — the rights statement you add deliberately — travels with the file.

Sharing a batch of product photos with a supplier overseas: the photos carry factory and studio GPS coordinates that reveal your supply chain. Stripping before sending removes that operational detail.

Archiving photos for a legal matter: your lawyer needs the images as exhibits, not as evidence about your camera or whereabouts. Stripping the metadata focuses the exhibit on the pixel content rather than the provenance trail.

Submitting photos to a publication that requires clean files: some editorial workflows require metadata-free files to avoid rights disputes over third-party IPTC records embedded by previous editors. A batch strip delivers that standard without manually editing each file.

Handing off assets to a developer for a website build: design mockup exports from Figma or Photoshop often carry application-specific XMP editing history that adds file size without helping the site visitor. Stripping reduces the payload before assets enter version control.

Four common errors and misconceptions about metadata removal

Taking a screenshot of a photo and treating the screenshot as metadata-free. A screenshot is always metadata-free because the screenshot capture writes a new file with no EXIF block. But the original photo still exists on your device with all its metadata intact. If you share the screenshot it has no EXIF, but if you share the original file alongside it, or if someone has already saved the original, the metadata is still there. Stripping operates on the original file; screenshotting creates a separate file.

Assuming that converting a photo to a different format removes metadata. Converting HEIC to JPEG, for example, copies the EXIF block from the source container into the JPEG container. The conversion step does not strip; it preserves. If you want the converted file to be metadata-free, run it through a stripping tool after conversion — or use the HEIC to JPEG converter combined with this stripper in sequence.

Believing that editing an image in a photo editor removes its metadata. Cropping, adjusting colour, or applying a filter in most editors rewrites the pixel data but preserves or adds to the EXIF block. Lightroom appends its own XMP editing history. Even a simple crop in macOS Preview preserves the GPS block. Editing does not strip; it often adds.

Thinking that "deleting" metadata fields one at a time in a viewer is equivalent to stripping. Some metadata viewers let you delete individual tags. GPS can be nulled out by setting latitude and longitude to zero, for example. But zeroing a field still leaves the tag present in the file — it just reads 0,0, which is a point in the Gulf of Guinea. A stripping operation removes the entire EXIF segment, not individual values within it.

GPS removal versus full strip — when to use which

Photographers who log shooting data for post-processing — focal length, aperture, ISO, colour temperature — often want to keep camera EXIF and remove only the GPS cluster. The GPS-only remover handles that case: it strips the five GPS tags and leaves everything else intact.

For anything going to a public URL you do not fully control — social media, a portfolio site, a stock library, an email to someone you do not know — stripping everything is simpler and leaves no residual risk from fields you forgot to check. The full strip on this page takes the same number of clicks and removes the GPS block alongside camera model, device serial, capture time, and software provenance in one step.

Privacy: why browser-side processing matters

Metadata stripping tools on the web typically work one of two ways: the file is uploaded to a server that runs ExifTool or a similar library and returns a clean copy, or the stripping happens in JavaScript running inside your browser tab using the Canvas API. The second approach means the pixel data and all the metadata it carries — GPS, camera serial, capture time — never travel over a network.

This tool uses the canvas approach. You can verify it by opening the browser network panel (F12 → Network) before dropping a file. There are no outbound requests. If you want to confirm the strip worked after downloading, re-open the cleaned file in the metadata viewer — it will show an empty EXIF block if the strip was complete.

EXIF, IPTC, and XMP — what each block actually stores

People treat "metadata" as one thing, but there are three separate containers baked into most JPEG and TIFF files, and they were designed by different organisations for different jobs.

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) was defined by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association back in the 1990s to let digital cameras record technical shooting data. When you take a photo, the camera writes the model name, lens identifier, focal length, f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, white balance setting, flash state, and capture timestamp directly into the file. On a smartphone, the GPS chip contributes latitude, longitude, altitude, and a GPS timestamp that is often several seconds off from the capture time because the two clocks run independently. Device serial numbers sometimes appear here too, depending on the manufacturer's firmware.

IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) was created for photo agencies and newspaper picture desks. Its fields are editorial rather than technical: headline, caption, byline, photographer credit, copyright notice, keywords, city, state, country, and a "special instructions" field that wire services used to route images to the right desk. A photographer who fills in these fields in Lightroom or Capture One is writing into the IPTC block. If you received a press photo and it still has IPTC intact, the caption field may contain the photographer's name and the client's name verbatim.

XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) is an Adobe standard from 2001 that stores data as an XML document embedded inside the image file. It overlaps with EXIF and IPTC — you can have the same keyword in all three blocks — but XMP is also where editing software writes history. Lightroom stores the full develop history: every slider you moved, every preset applied, the original capture values before any adjustment. Photoshop writes layer information references and version markers. This means an XMP block can reveal not just that you own a particular camera, but that you used Lightroom 7.4, applied a specific third-party preset, and spent forty minutes editing a given photo. For most personal sharing that detail is harmless, but for commercial work where clients are not supposed to know your editing workflow, it is worth stripping.

All three blocks travel with the file silently. A standard file manager, a messaging app, and most social platforms do not surface them to the viewer — but anyone who downloads the file and opens it in a metadata reader can see everything.

Does stripping metadata change the actual image?

The short answer is no — the pixels are untouched. A JPEG stores compressed pixel data in one section of the file and metadata in separate segments near the header. Removing those metadata segments does not decompress and re-compress the pixel data, so there is no generation loss and the image dimensions stay identical. File size drops because the removed blocks are gone, but the visual content is the same.

Two things are worth knowing about, though. The first is the ICC colour profile. This is a small block (a few kilobytes) that tells a display or printer how to interpret the colour values in the file. If you shoot in Display P3 on an iPhone and the profile is stripped alongside the metadata, browsers and apps that do not default to sRGB may render colours slightly differently — usually a bit flatter or more saturated depending on the display. Good stripping tools preserve the ICC profile and only remove EXIF, IPTC, and XMP. This tool does exactly that: the colour profile stays in the output file.

The second thing is the Orientation tag. Cameras write a rotation flag in EXIF — a single value from 1 to 8 — to indicate that the physical sensor was rotated when the photo was taken. Most software reads this tag and rotates the displayed image accordingly, so a portrait photo looks upright even though the raw pixel grid is landscape-oriented. If you strip EXIF without first rotating the pixel data to match the tag, some viewers will display the image sideways or upside-down. This is a real gotcha and it catches people out regularly. The correct behaviour is to apply the rotation to the pixels and then strip the tag, which is what this tool does when processing through the canvas pipeline — the canvas draws the image in the correct orientation, so the output file has the pixels already rotated and the Orientation tag removed cleanly.

Pre-upload checklist before sharing photos on social platforms

Social platforms strip metadata on their end before serving images to viewers, but they may keep a copy of it on their servers — and even if they do not, the time between your upload and their processing is a window where the original file with full metadata exists on their infrastructure. Stripping before you upload is the only way to guarantee the data never leaves your device.

Here is a quick checklist to run through before uploading any photo publicly:

• Check for GPS first. Open the file in the metadata viewer and look for GPS fields. If you see a latitude and longitude, decide whether you want to keep or remove them before anything else — GPS is the highest-risk field for most people.
• Check for device serial numbers. Some cameras and phones write a body serial number into EXIF. If you are posting anonymously or selling the camera later, that serial links the file back to a specific device.
• Check the capture timestamp. EXIF timestamps are in the camera's local time zone (usually — timezone handling is inconsistent across manufacturers). A series of photos with timestamps can reveal a daily schedule even without GPS.
• Check IPTC caption and byline fields. If you imported photos from a stock agency or a press wire, these fields may contain names, client details, or copyright strings you do not want to re-publish.
• Decide whether to keep or strip the colour profile. For images going to a wide audience on unknown screens, keeping sRGB is the safe default. If your photo is Display P3 and colour accuracy matters, keep the profile — it will display correctly on modern browsers and be ignored on older ones.
• Strip, then verify. Download the stripped file and re-open it in the metadata viewer. An empty EXIF block confirms the strip worked. This takes ten seconds and removes any doubt.

None of this is complicated once it becomes habit. Running a photo through the stripper before sharing publicly is the same kind of low-effort, high-value step as checking a document for tracked changes before sending it — something you only forget once.