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freecompressconvert
client-side only

Remove hidden data from photos

Drop a photo and the page tells you what it is carrying: where it was taken, when, and on what. Converting removes every bit of it, on your own machine.

· PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP

A whole folder at once is fine. Nothing is uploaded.

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Out0 B
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    Quick answer

    Your photo probably knows where you live

    // Answer

    A phone photo taken at home with location tagging switched on carries the GPS coordinates of your home inside the file. Phone GPS is typically good to about 5 metres under open sky, and less precise indoors. Anyone who receives that file can read them in a few clicks. It is not visible, it is not obvious, and it is easy to forget it is there. Drop a photo above and you will see exactly what yours is carrying.

    When it matters

    Where this actually bites people

    • Selling something online. A photo of the item, taken in your living room, can tell a buyer where you live before they have said hello.
    • Renting or listing a property. The same, in reverse, with dates attached.
    • Photos of children. Location plus a timestamp is more than most parents intend to publish.
    • Anything anonymous. A single photo can undo a lot of care taken elsewhere.
    • Work photos. Camera serial numbers tie a set of images to one device, which is sometimes exactly what you do not want.
    The method

    Why this cannot leave anything behind

    Some tools delete the metadata fields they know about, which means anything unusual can survive. This one does not edit your file at all. It decodes the image to raw pixels, then writes a brand new file from those pixels. The output has no history, because it was not made from the original file, only from the picture inside it.

    The side effect is that everything else goes too, including the colour profile and the rotation flag. Browsers apply the rotation flag when they read the photo, so it normally comes out the right way up; the rotate buttons are there for the odd one that does not.

    FAQ

    Frequently asked questions

    Usually the exact date and time, the make and model of the camera or phone, the lens and exposure settings, and, when location tagging is switched on in the camera, the GPS coordinates of where you were standing. Sometimes a serial number, and sometimes the name of whoever owns the device.
    Some large platforms remove it from the copy other people see, but you cannot check that from the outside. But a photo emailed, put in a shared folder, attached to a listing, sent through a messaging app that keeps the original, or posted on a small site is very often untouched. The safe assumption is that it is still there.
    The image is decoded to raw pixels and written out again as a completely new file. Metadata is not stripped so much as never carried across: there is no mechanism by which it could survive a re-encode.
    Yes, and you should. Put the file you downloaded back into this page. If the report finds no location, date or camera, none of those is in the file. You can also right-click it, open Properties or Get Info, and look at the details tab.
    Choose PNG and no compression loss is added. Choose JPG or WebP and it is re-compressed, so set the quality to 100 if you want it close to untouched; the file will usually be larger than the original at that setting. Photos shot in a wide colour space can look very slightly different, because the colour profile is not carried across.
    No, and on this page that matters more than anywhere else. A photo whose location you want removed is the last thing you should send to a stranger to have it removed. It never leaves the tab.

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