Straight answer
Does removing metadata remove SynthID?
No. Removing metadata does not remove SynthID, and no tool that only edits metadata can. They are two different things living in two different places, and it is worth understanding the difference before you trust any tool that claims otherwise.
Metadata sits beside the picture. SynthID sits inside it.
A file's metadata is a block of information attached to the image: the camera, the date, the GPS position, an XMP field saying the file was generated by a model. It is separate from the pixels. Rewrite the file without that block and it is gone, and the picture itself is untouched.
SynthID, from Google, works the other way around. It adjusts the pixel values themselves in a pattern a detector can recognise but your eye cannot. There is no block to delete. The watermark is the picture. Strip every tag from a Veo clip or an Imagen image and the signal is still there, because you never touched the thing carrying it.
What it survives
SynthID is built to survive ordinary handling. Screenshotting, cropping, re-encoding, compression, resizing and colour adjustment are all expected, and the watermark is designed to come through them. In video it is spread across frames and into the audio, which makes it harder still to disturb by accident.
So the honest position is: there is no public method to detect or remove SynthID, and this tool does not claim one. If a service tells you it strips SynthID by cleaning metadata, it is either mistaken or describing something else.
What can actually disturb a pixel watermark
Only one approach is known to work, and it is not subtle: run the picture back through a diffusion model and have it redraw the image. Because the model regenerates the pixels, the pattern in the original ones does not survive. That needs roughly ten gigabytes of model weights and a graphics card, and it visibly repaints your image, so the result is not quite the picture you started with. It also only applies to still images. Nothing of the kind exists for video.
What this tool does do
It removes the metadata layer completely and tells you plainly when something is left behind. Drop a file into the Metadata tab and it lists every tag, including the AI provenance fields. Clean it and those fields go. If the file came from a generator known to embed a pixel watermark, the report says so before you press Clean, so a green badge is never mistaken for "undetectable".
That distinction matters if you are relying on it. Removing the metadata removes the record. It does not remove the evidence in the picture.
Common questions
Does removing metadata remove SynthID?
No. Metadata sits beside the picture and can be deleted. SynthID is encoded in the pixel values themselves, so there is no block to remove. Stripping every tag from a file leaves the SynthID signal exactly where it was.
Can any tool remove SynthID?
There is no public method to detect or remove SynthID. The only known way to disturb a pixel watermark is to regenerate the image through a diffusion model, which needs roughly ten gigabytes of weights and a GPU, visibly repaints the picture, and works on still images only.
Does SynthID survive screenshots and cropping?
Yes. It is designed to survive screenshotting, cropping, resizing, compression and re-encoding. In video it is spread across frames and into the audio.