Photo privacy
Remove the hidden data from your photos
Every photo your phone or camera takes carries a block of data that has nothing to do with the picture. It records the make and model of the device, the lens, the shutter speed, the date and time down to the second, and on most phones the exact spot on earth where you were standing. None of it is visible when you look at the image. All of it travels with the file.
That matters because the file usually goes somewhere. You email a photo to a landlord, post one on a forum, send a picture of an item you are selling to a stranger. Large social networks strip most of this on upload, but a file attached to an email, uploaded to a small site, shared in a chat app as a "document" rather than a photo, or handed over on a USB stick keeps everything.
What is actually in there
| Tag group | Typical contents |
|---|---|
| EXIF | Camera make and model, lens, serial number, ISO, exposure, orientation, original capture date and time |
| GPS | Latitude, longitude, altitude, and sometimes a compass bearing |
| XMP | Author, copyright, editing history, the software that last saved the file, AI generation tags |
| IPTC | Captions, keywords, creator contact details added by photo software |
| Maker notes | Vendor-specific blobs, which on some cameras include a body serial number |
| Thumbnails | A small embedded preview, which can still show the uncropped original |
The embedded thumbnail is the one that surprises people. Some editors update the full image when you crop but leave the preview untouched, so the thing you cropped out is still sitting inside the file.
Read it first, then remove it
Guessing is not useful here, so the tool does two separate jobs. The Metadata tab is a read-only viewer: drop a file in and it lists every tag it can find, grouped by source, with the entries that identify a person, a place or a device flagged at the top. Nothing is written. If there are GPS tags they are resolved to real coordinates and offered as a map link you can click, rather than an embedded map that would ship your coordinates to a tile server just for loading the page.
Once you know what is in there, the Images tab removes it. PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF and HEIC are supported. The default wipes every tag. If you would rather keep the ordinary camera data and remove only AI provenance, turn on Keep non-AI metadata.
The picture itself is not touched
Cleaning rewrites the file's headers, not its pixels. There is no re-encoding, no quality
loss and no visible change. Your original file is never modified either: you get a new copy
named photo.cleaned.jpg and the file you dropped in stays exactly as it was.
What this does not fix
Removing metadata removes the record. It does not change the image. If the photo shows your street sign, your face or your reflection in a window, stripping EXIF does nothing about that. And if the image came out of an AI model that embeds a watermark in the pixels themselves, such as Google's SynthID, that signal survives this and every other metadata tool. Read what AI tags can and cannot be removed for the detail.