EXIF
Strip EXIF data out of your images
EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. It is the block of technical data a camera writes into a JPEG or HEIC the moment it takes a picture, and it has been standard since the late 1990s. It is genuinely useful while the photo is yours: it is how your photo library sorts by date, groups by place and tells you which lens you used. It becomes a problem the moment the file leaves your control.
Why people want it gone
- Location. A phone photo taken with location services on carries the coordinates of the spot where you stood, usually accurate to a few metres.
- Timing. The original capture timestamp is separate from the file's modified date and survives copying, so it shows when a photo was really taken.
- Device identity. Camera make, model and, on many bodies, a serial number. That links every photo from the same camera together, even across accounts.
- Names. Editing software writes an author or copyright field, often filled in with a real name once and then forgotten about.
- Edit history. XMP can record which program touched the file and when.
How to strip it
Open the Images tab, drop the file in, and press Clean. You get back
name.cleaned.jpg with the tag blocks removed. You can drop several files at once.
Nothing is uploaded anywhere beyond the request that does the work, and nothing is kept
afterwards.
Under the surface the file is rewritten without its metadata segments: JPEG APPn segments,
PNG tEXt and iTXt chunks, WebP metadata chunks, XMP packets and C2PA
manifests. The compressed image data is copied across untouched, so the picture is
bit-for-bit identical and there is no generational quality loss from cleaning.
Check your work
Do not take a green tick on faith. Drop the cleaned file into the Metadata tab and read it back. A cleaned image should come back with little more than its dimensions, colour type and file size. This round trip takes five seconds and is the only way to actually know.
Keeping some of it
Wiping everything is the default because it is what most people want. It also throws away things you might care about, such as the capture date or the copyright field on work you want credited. The Keep non-AI metadata option keeps ordinary camera tags and removes only AI and C2PA provenance. Turn it on when you are publishing your own photography and want the credit to survive.
Other formats
The same idea applies well beyond images. Video and audio files carry their own tag blocks and are handled on the Video and Audio tabs, where the tags are removed without re-encoding, so a three gigabyte movie cleans in milliseconds and the picture is untouched. PDF, DOCX and ODT carry document properties with author names and software versions, and those go through the Files tab.
A note on screenshots and exports
Screenshots normally carry very little, but exports do not. Sending a photo through a design tool, a converter or a messaging app often adds fresh metadata rather than removing it, naming the software that produced the file. If a file has been through a pipeline, check it at the end of the pipeline rather than the beginning.