In late 2012, the software entrepreneur John McAfee was on the run from authorities in Belize. A journalist traveling with him posted a triumphant photo online — and within hours, readers had pulled the GPS coordinates straight out of the image file and placed him at a spot across the border in Guatemala. He never typed his location anywhere. His camera had already written it down, in a block of hidden text riding along inside the picture.
That block is EXIF data — short for Exchangeable Image File Format — and almost every photo your phone or camera saves is carrying some. It sits alongside the pixels, invisible when you look at the image, and it comes along for the ride when you upload, email, or sell the file. Clearing it out before a photo leaves your hands takes seconds. Here is what lives in there, how to wipe it, and the point where wiping stops being enough.
What's actually written into the file
EXIF is a compact record tucked into the image, kept separate from the visible picture. The field worth worrying about most is GPS: latitude and longitude precise enough to drop a pin on a specific address, sometimes within a few meters. Around it you will usually find the capture date and time, the make and model of the camera or phone, the lens, the image orientation, and the name of whatever app last touched the file. None of it shows when you open the photo, which is exactly why it slips past people.
The catch runs both ways. A screenshot, or a picture you saved off Instagram or Facebook, has probably already been scrubbed — most big platforms strip metadata the moment you upload. But a shot pulled straight off a phone or a memory card tends to carry the whole record, GPS included, if location services were switched on when you pressed the shutter.
Why redrawing the picture wipes it clean
The Strip EXIF Data From Photo tool on Every Boring Tool takes a blunt but reliable approach: it reads your image, paints its pixels onto a brand-new canvas, and encodes that canvas as a fresh file. Because the replacement is assembled from nothing but the pixels themselves, there is no slot for the old EXIF, GPS, camera, or editing tags to survive in — they simply are not copied across.
All of that happens on your own machine, inside the page you already have open. The photo is never handed off to a server, you do not sign in to anything, and the file you get back is not stamped with any badge. Once the page has loaded you could even pull the network cable and it would keep working; the only ceiling on file size is your device's own memory.
Cleaning a photo, step by step
- Open the Strip EXIF Data From Photo tool and pick a photo with the file chooser. JPG and PNG load directly; WebP and other formats the browser can read work too.
- Look over the "Metadata found in the original" panel. The tool inspects the file and names what it turned up — camera and device, lens, software, date taken, GPS location. When coordinates are present it prints them and warns that they give away where the shot was taken.
- Choose an output format. "Keep original" hands a JPG back as JPG and a PNG back as PNG; you can instead force JPG for a smaller file or PNG for a lossless one.
- Exporting as JPG? Set the quality slider. The default of 92 stays visually close to the source, while lower numbers trade a little sharpness for a smaller file.
- Glance at the summary tiles: original size, cleaned size, how many tags were dropped, and pixel dimensions — which do not budge.
- Hit "Download clean image." It saves with a
-cleansuffix, so your untouched original stays right where it was.
Where this tool draws the line
It is built to do one job, and it is honest about the edges of that job.
- The scanner only reads JPEG EXIF. Feed it a PNG or a WebP and the "metadata found" list will usually come up empty even if the file did hold some tags — the reader is written to parse JPEG EXIF segments specifically. The cleaning itself is unaffected: whatever metadata was embedded gets dropped during re-encoding no matter the format. So an empty list means the scanner could not name the tags before erasing them, not that the erasing was skipped.
- Re-saving a JPG is not lossless. Every time a JPG is written out, it runs through compression again. At quality 92 the difference is hard to spot, but it is not a byte-for-byte duplicate. If you need a pristine archival master, hold on to the original and share only the cleaned copy — or export to PNG to sidestep the extra compression, at the cost of a much bigger file.
- One photo per pass. For dozens or hundreds of images, a batch tool or a command-line utility like ExifTool will run circles around this.
- It clears metadata, not content. Stripping EXIF hides when and where a photo was taken. It does nothing about clues inside the frame — a street sign, a house number, a face reflected in a window. The picture itself can still give you away.
- Odd or oversized files can fail. A corrupt file, something that is not really an image, or a photo too large for the browser to decode will raise an error rather than quietly hand back a bad result.
Times you'll want something heavier
For an entire folder at once — or for RAW camera files and video the browser cannot even open — reach for a desktop program like ExifTool, which clears metadata across a pile of files in a single command. If you are on a phone and just want a quick one-off, both iOS and Android can share a photo with the location stripped straight from the share sheet's options.
The in-browser route earns its place when you want to see exactly what a single image is broadcasting before you strip it, keep the file on your own machine the entire time, and walk away with a clean copy in a few seconds without installing a thing. Before you post, send, or list that photo, it is usually all the cleanup it needs.