What a photo carries besides the picture
Every photo from a phone or a camera holds a block of data called EXIF, and many also hold XMP and IPTC. Together they can say:
- Where it was taken: the GPS position to a few metres, the altitude and the direction the camera faced.
- What took it: the phone or camera model, the lens, the software, and sometimes the device's serial number.
- When: the date and time to the second, with the time zone.
- Who: the owner's name, the author and copyright, and contact details.
- What happened to it: the editing history, the original document ID, and a small thumbnail that can still show the uncropped original.
Most people never see any of this, and it travels with the file wherever it goes: email attachments, chat apps that keep the original, marketplaces, documents and websites.
How to remove metadata from a photo
- Drop one or more photos above, paste one from the clipboard, or choose them from your device.
- Read what each one carries, grouped from location to AI provenance.
- Pick what to keep: the colour profile, the AI-generated label, and the author and copyright.
- Download each clean copy, or all of them as a zip. Every clean file is read again to confirm the details are gone.
For JPEG, PNG and WebP the clean copy is lossless: the tool removes the metadata blocks and copies the image data byte for byte, so the quality is exactly the same. Other formats, like AVIF and GIF, are re-saved as PNG without metadata.
AI images, C2PA and the AI-generated label
AI image tools increasingly label what they make. Some write a C2PA manifest (Content Credentials), a signed record of how an image was made. Others write an IPTC Digital Source Type such as trainedAlgorithmicMedia, and Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI save the full prompt and settings in the PNG.
This tool shows all of it, which makes it a quick way to check whether an image says it was made with AI. It can only report what the file says: a missing label doesn't prove a photo is real, and some AI images carry an invisible watermark in the pixels themselves, which no metadata tool removes.
When you clean an AI image, The AI-generated label stays on by default. Your prompts, settings and history are removed, but the clean copy still says it was made with AI. I built it this way on purpose: removing private data is a reasonable thing to want, passing an AI image off as a real photo is not, and in the EU the AI Act now asks for many AI images to be marked as such.
Why a clean copy matters for websites
Metadata is dead weight on a web page. A phone photo can carry tens of kilobytes of EXIF, a thumbnail and maker notes that no visitor ever sees, and every one of them is downloaded on every visit. Stripping it is the first step of a fast image pipeline, before resizing and modern formats like AVIF and WebP.
Private by design
Your images are never uploaded. They are read and rewritten by JavaScript in your browser, and the clean copies are saved straight from it. It works offline once the page has loaded. It is one of my free tools for product teams.