EXIF Viewer
See the camera, the timestamp and the location hidden inside a photo — then remove it all without re-encoding a single pixel.
Table of contents
How to see and remove photo metadata
- 1
Drop in a photo
A JPEG or PNG. It is read straight from your disk into the page — no upload, which matters more here than anywhere else on this site.
- 2
Read what it carries
Anything identifying is shown first: the camera and lens, the exact moment it was taken, and the coordinates if the photo has them. Camera settings follow underneath.
- 3
Save a clean copy
The metadata is removed and the image data copied across untouched. The result is the same photo, byte for byte, with the labels gone.
The photo of the sofa that shows your address
The classic case is a marketplace listing. You photograph something in your living room, upload it to a site that does not strip metadata, and the file carries the coordinates of your living room with it — accurate to a few metres, readable by anyone who downloads the picture and knows where to look.
Nothing about the image looks different. The data sits in a separate block inside the file, written by the camera and carried along by every copy, every email attachment and every chat forward. Large social platforms usually strip it on upload, but email, forums, cloud folders and most smaller sites do not.
It is not only location. The camera body and lens identify your equipment, the timestamp is accurate to the second, and the software field often names the app that edited it. Individually harmless; together, a reasonably precise description of who took the photo, with what, and where they were standing.
Removing it without spoiling the photo
The easy way to strip metadata is to open the image and save it again. It works, and it also re-encodes every pixel — so a step taken purely for privacy quietly costs you a generation of image quality. Do it a few times and the difference becomes visible.
A JPEG is a container, not a single blob. The compressed picture lives in its own segment, and the metadata sits in separate segments beside it. So this copies the image segment across untouched and simply omits the others. The output decodes to precisely the same pixels because it contains precisely the same compressed data — we checked against a 5.6 MB photograph and the image data came out identical, same length and same checksum. PNG works the same way, with text and timestamp chunks dropped and the pixel chunks copied through.
One thing is deliberately kept: the colour profile. It describes how the pixel values should be interpreted rather than anything about you, and removing it can visibly shift the colours.
Frequently asked questions
A block of information the camera writes inside the image file alongside the picture. It typically records the make and model of the camera or phone, the lens, the exposure settings, the exact date and time to the second, and — if location services were on — the latitude and longitude where you were standing. None of it is visible when you look at the photo, and all of it travels with the file.
No, and on this tool in particular that would be self-defeating. The file is read into the page and parsed by your browser. You can load this page, disconnect from the internet, and still read and strip metadata. Nothing is sent, nothing is stored.
That the picture is not re-encoded. Most metadata removers open the image and save it again, which drops the metadata as a side effect and also throws away a little image quality every time. This one treats the file as what it is — a container — and copies the compressed image data across untouched while dropping the metadata segments beside it. We verified this against a 5.6 MB photograph: the image data came out byte for byte identical, same length, same checksum.
Most large platforms do strip EXIF when you upload, though they read it first. The gap is everywhere else: files sent over email or chat, uploaded to forums and marketplaces, attached to a support ticket, or shared in a cloud folder generally keep everything. A photo of something you are selling, taken at home, commonly carries your home coordinates.
Usually to within a few metres — precise enough to identify a specific building, and often a specific room. That is why it is shown first and why there is a link to see it on a map: the number itself does not convey how exposing it is until you look at where it points.
Because it is not information about you, and removing it changes how the image looks. A colour profile tells software how to interpret the pixel values; strip it and colours can shift visibly, especially on wide-gamut photos. This removes what identifies you and keeps what renders the picture correctly.
JPEG and PNG, which is where photo metadata overwhelmingly lives. HEIC is not supported because only Safari can decode it, and a tool that quietly works for some visitors and not others is worse than one that says so. Sharing a photo off an iPhone usually converts it to JPEG anyway.
It gets slightly smaller, by exactly the size of what was removed — often a few kilobytes, sometimes more if the camera embedded a thumbnail. The tool tells you how much it took out.
Not yet — this tool handles one at a time so it can show you what each file contains, which is the point of looking. If you only want the pixels and not the labels, the image compressor drops all metadata as a side effect of re-encoding, and handles batches.
The Zeal Promise
Non-negotiable, on every tool we ship.
- No sign-up — ever
- No watermarks on any output
- No ads near the download button
- Works fully on mobile
- Privacy-first: processing stays in your browser
- Open source (MIT) — audit it, contribute, self-host
- Zero runtime dependencies in tool logic