Every photo your phone or camera takes carries hidden metadata called EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format). It can include the exact GPS coordinates where the shot was taken, the date and time, your camera or phone model, lens, and the editing software you used. When you share a photo online, that data often travels with it. Stripping EXIF is a quick way to protect your privacy before posting, selling, or sending images. Here is how to do it, what to watch out for, and when a different method makes more sense.
What EXIF metadata actually contains
EXIF is a small block of text embedded inside the image file itself, separate from the pixels you see. The most sensitive field is GPS location, which can pin a photo to a specific address, often accurate to a few meters. Other common fields include the original date and time, camera make and model, lens, orientation, and the name of any app used to edit the file. None of it is visible when you look at the picture, which is exactly why it is easy to overlook.
Not every photo has all of these fields. Screenshots and many images downloaded from social platforms have already been stripped, because most large sites remove metadata on upload. Photos straight off a phone or camera almost always carry the full set, including GPS if location services were on.
How to remove EXIF data with a browser tool
The Strip EXIF Data From Photo tool on Every Boring Tool does this entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded to a server, there is no sign-up, and nothing is watermarked. It works by reading the image, then re-drawing its pixels onto a fresh canvas and re-encoding that as a new file. Because the new file is built from scratch, every EXIF, GPS, camera, and editing tag is dropped in the process.
Steps
- Open the Strip EXIF Data From Photo tool and choose a photo using the file picker. JPG and PNG work directly; WebP and other browser-readable formats also work.
- Read the "Metadata found in the original" panel. The tool scans the file and lists what it detected, such as camera and device, lens, software, date taken, and GPS location. If GPS is present, it shows the coordinates and flags that they reveal where the photo was taken.
- Pick an output format. "Keep original" leaves a JPG as JPG and a PNG as PNG. You can also force JPG for a smaller file or PNG for lossless output.
- If you are exporting JPG, set the quality slider. The default of 92 keeps quality close to the original; lower values shrink the file further at some visible cost.
- Check the summary tiles: original size, cleaned size, number of tags removed, and pixel dimensions (which stay unchanged).
- Click "Download clean image." The file is saved with a
-cleansuffix so you do not overwrite your original.
The whole thing happens locally, so it works offline once the page has loaded, and large photos are limited only by your own device.
Honest limits and failure modes
This tool is deliberately narrow, and it is worth knowing where it stops.
- The metadata scanner reads JPEG EXIF only. If you load a PNG or WebP, the "metadata found" list will usually be empty even when the file did contain some metadata, because the reader parses JPEG EXIF segments specifically. The cleaning step still works: any embedded metadata is discarded during re-encoding regardless of format. So an empty list does not mean the cleaning was skipped; it means the scanner could not name the tags before removing them.
- Re-encoding is not lossless for JPG. Every time a JPG is re-saved, it goes through compression again. At quality 92 the change is hard to see, but it is not a byte-for-byte copy. If you need to keep a pristine archival original, keep your untouched file and only share the cleaned copy. Choosing PNG output avoids added compression loss but produces a much larger file.
- It handles one photo at a time. For dozens or hundreds of images, a batch tool or a command-line utility like ExifTool will be far faster.
- It removes metadata; it does not remove content. Stripping EXIF hides where and when a photo was taken. It does nothing about identifying details inside the image itself, such as a street sign, a house number, or a reflection. Privacy is only as good as the picture allows.
- Very large or unusual files may fail. If a file is corrupt, is not really an image, or is too big for the browser to decode, the tool will show an error rather than a silent bad result.
When a different approach is better
For a whole folder of images, or for RAW camera files and video, use a dedicated desktop program such as ExifTool, which can wipe metadata across many files in one command and supports formats a browser cannot open. On a phone, both iOS and Android let you share a photo without location data through the share sheet's options, which is convenient for a quick one-off.
The browser tool is the right choice when you want to see exactly what a single photo is revealing before you strip it, keep the file on your own machine, and get a clean copy in a few seconds without installing anything. For the common case of cleaning a photo before you post or send it, that is usually all you need.