// what is EXIF, and why strip it?
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is metadata your camera or phone tucks inside each photo. It's genuinely useful; it's how your photo app knows the shutter speed or sorts shots by date. But it can also leak more than you intend.
- GPS coordinates. Phones often record the exact spot a photo was taken. Share the original and you may be sharing your home address. This tool flags GPS in red when it finds it.
- Device & timestamp. Camera make/model, lens, and the precise capture time are all commonly embedded.
Big social networks usually strip EXIF on upload, but email, messaging apps, and cloud drives frequently keep it. When in doubt, clean it.
How stripping works: the cleaned copy is produced by drawing the image onto a blank canvas and re-encoding it. Canvas output carries no metadata, so every EXIF tag, including GPS, is gone. (A small trade-off: re-encoding a JPEG is slightly lossy. For pixel-perfect originals, keep your master and share the clean copy.)
Privacy: only the first chunk of each file is read to parse metadata, and re-encoding happens on a local canvas. Nothing is uploaded.
Related: also want smaller files? The Image Compressor & Resizer shrinks images (and drops EXIF as a side effect).
// a free, browser-only tool by Tiempo Software, built in Omaha, Nebraska. Runs entirely in your browser; nothing you enter is uploaded. see all tools.