EXIF Metadata Viewer

Why strip EXIF before sharing photos

Most phones and cameras silently embed precise GPS coordinates, camera serial numbers, and timestamps in every photo. When you share that photo on a forum, blog, or chat that does not strip metadata, anyone with a free EXIF tool can pinpoint where the picture was taken — often to within a few meters of your house, office, or hotel.

This tool gives you a fast way to inspect what a photo reveals and to download a clean copy with the metadata blocks removed. Everything happens inside your browser tab.

What the tool removes

The strip pass walks the JPEG marker stream and drops the segments that typically carry personal data:

• APP1 — EXIF (camera, GPS, timestamps) and XMP (Adobe metadata, edit history)
• APP13 — Photoshop / IPTC (caption, copyright, contact info)

Marker segments that the browser needs to decode the photo correctly are kept untouched: the SOI start marker, JFIF (APP0), ICC color profile (APP2), the Adobe color transform marker (APP14, without which CMYK JPEGs decode with wrong colors), the SOS scan marker, the compressed image data, and the EOI end marker. Color appearance is preserved.

If the photo has an Orientation tag with a value from 2 to 8, the tool writes a new APP1 in place of the old one that holds only that tag (IFD0 tag 0x0112 in the Exif 2.32 and 3.0 standard, 36 bytes). Phones store a portrait photo sideways and set Orientation 6 or 8 so viewers rotate it; without the tag the cleaned copy would be shown sideways. The tag only says how to rotate the image. The result is the same as exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -Orientation photo.jpg.

Example

A 64 × 48 test JPEG with this EXIF (written with sharp 0.34 and checked with ExifTool 13.55) shows these rows in the tool:

The coordinates point at the Eiffel Tower to within a few meters, which is the reason to strip before sharing. Download cleaned JPEG turned the 882-byte file into a 286-byte file; reading the cleaned file again finds no EXIF, and the image is still 64 × 48. The tool rounds for display (f/1.8 for 1.78, 7 mm for 6.86); Copy EXIF JSON gives the unrounded values.

What EXIF fields you may see

• Camera: make, model, lens model — e.g. Apple iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone back camera 6.86mm f/1.78
• Date: original capture time, last modification time
• Exposure: aperture (f-number), shutter speed, ISO, focal length
• GPS: latitude, longitude, altitude, plus a direct Google Maps link
• Software: the OS or editing app that wrote the file

Limitations

• Orientation is kept. It is the only tag left in the cleaned copy (see above). Value 1 (upright) and values outside 1–8 are not written back. An orientation stored only in XMP is removed with the XMP block.
• JPEG only, up to 100 MB. PNG, HEIC, WebP and TIFF are rejected. Pasting works only when the clipboard holds a JPEG; screenshots are usually PNG.
• The viewer shows a fixed set of fields: the ones in the table above. Other tags, such as the camera serial number or the time zone offset (OffsetTimeOriginal), are not listed but are removed by the download. Text tags stored with the UTF-8 type added in EXIF 3.0 are not decoded.
• Only APP1 and APP13 are removed. Comment segments (COM), other application segments (APP3–APP12, APP15) and any data after the end-of-image marker, such as the extra images that some phones append for HDR or depth, are kept. For a full clean, run exiftool -all= photo.jpg or re-save the image in an editor.

Privacy notes

• The page never uploads your photo. Confirm by opening the browser’s network tab while you use the tool. Because photos can reveal where you live, this page does not load Google Analytics or AdSense, and nothing you open is saved in the browser.
• The Google Maps link is built locally and only opens when you click it — until then no request is made.
• If you want to keep the metadata for your own records, use Copy EXIF JSON before downloading the cleaned file.