What your photos say behind your back
Every photo from a phone or camera carries a hidden block of metadata called EXIF. It typically records the GPS coordinates of where you were standing, the exact date and time to the second, the make and model of your device, the camera settings, and the software the image has passed through. None of it is visible in the picture, all of it travels with the file, and anyone who receives the photo can read it with free tools in seconds.
That combination leaks more than people expect. A photo of your new sofa can reveal your home address. A selfie shared from "somewhere sunny" pins down the hotel. A set of listing photos can show which days you are usually out. The GPS tag is not vague, either:
Why re-encoding removes everything
Metadata lives alongside the pixels in the file, not inside them. So rather than hunting through the file deleting fields one by one, and risking missing some, this tool takes the nuclear option: it redraws your photo pixel by pixel onto a blank canvas and saves the result as a completely fresh JPEG at quality 95. The new file is built from nothing but pixel data, so it contains no EXIF block at all. No GPS, no timestamps, no device details, no embedded thumbnail, because there is nowhere left for them to hide.
One nice side effect: if your phone stored the photo rotated with an orientation flag, the correct rotation is baked into the clean copy, so it will not appear sideways in software that ignores the flag.
What else changes in the clean copy
Total honesty about the trade: the clean copy is a re-encoded JPEG, so it is not byte-identical to your original. At quality 95 the difference is visually indistinguishable for sharing, but it exists, so keep your original for archiving. The embedded colour profile is also dropped along with the rest of the metadata, which means a photo taken in a wide gamut colour space such as Display P3 may look very slightly different on some screens, since software will assume standard sRGB. For the overwhelming majority of photos, taken and viewed in sRGB, nothing visible changes at all.
Transparency does not survive either, because JPEG has no transparency; a transparent PNG comes out on a white background. For photos, which have no transparent areas, this is irrelevant.
The one tool where privacy is the point
It would be absurd to strip location data from a photo by uploading that photo to a stranger's server. This tool does not: the file is read, redrawn and re-encoded entirely on your own device, and the clean copy is handed straight back as a download. Nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored, and there are no copies anywhere but your machine. Strip the metadata, download the clean copy, and send that one instead of the original, by email and messaging apps especially, which often pass EXIF through untouched.
Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. The photo is read and re-encoded by JavaScript running on your own device. It never travels over the internet, nothing is logged or stored, and closing the tab removes everything. That matters more than usual for a tool handling photos with location data in them.
What does EXIF metadata actually contain?
Typically the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, the exact date and time, the camera or phone make and model, camera settings such as aperture and shutter speed, the editing software used, and sometimes a small embedded thumbnail. Most of it is written automatically without you ever seeing it.
How does this tool remove it?
It redraws your photo pixel by pixel onto a blank canvas and saves the result as a fresh JPEG. Metadata lives alongside the pixels in the file, not inside them, so a file rebuilt from pixels alone contains no EXIF at all, including GPS. Nothing is selectively edited, so nothing can be missed.
Does the image quality change?
Very slightly. The clean copy is re-encoded as a JPEG at quality 95, which is visually indistinguishable from the original for normal use. The embedded colour profile is also dropped, so photos taken in a wide gamut colour space may shift a little. Keep your original if exact fidelity matters.
Do social networks not strip EXIF anyway?
The big platforms do remove metadata from photos they display publicly. But photos sent by email, some messaging apps, cloud storage links and your own website keep every byte of it. If a photo is leaving your hands, stripping the metadata yourself first is the only way to be sure.