EXIF Viewer & Metadata Remover

Every photo you take carries an invisible passenger. Alongside the pixels, your camera or phone writes a block of metadata describing exactly how, when, and where the picture was made. It’s genuinely useful — until you share the photo and that hidden data travels with it. This guide explains what’s in there, how to read it, how to see where a photo was taken, and how to strip it all out. You can do every part with the free tool at the top of this page; it runs entirely in your browser.

What is EXIF data?

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is the standard for embedding metadata inside image files, mainly JPG and TIFF. When you press the shutter, your device records a surprising amount of detail:

• Camera and lens — make, model, and often the lens.
• Exposure — aperture (f-number), shutter speed, ISO, focal length, flash, white balance.
• Date and time — when the photo was taken, sometimes down to the time zone.
• Software — the app or firmware that created or last edited the file.
• GPS location — the exact latitude and longitude, if location services were on.
• Thumbnails and maker notes — a small preview and proprietary, camera-specific data.

Photos can also carry XMP (used by editing apps like Lightroom), IPTC (captions, keywords, copyright used by news agencies), and ICC colour profiles. Together these make up the full metadata footprint of an image.

How to view EXIF data

Reading EXIF doesn’t require special software anymore. With the tool above:

1. Open your photo. Drag it onto the tool, click Choose image, or paste from your clipboard. JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, and TIFF all work.
2. Read the Metadata tab. Everything found is grouped into clear sections — camera and capture, date and time, author and software, and any other fields.
3. Explore the other tabs. Location maps a geotag; Size & DPI shows dimensions and resolution.

Because the tool parses the raw file bytes, it can read metadata even from formats the browser can’t display — like an iPhone HEIC photo or a multi-page TIFF.

The privacy problem: location data

The single most sensitive field is GPS location. Phones geotag photos by default, writing the precise coordinates of where each picture was taken. That’s helpful for organising a holiday album — and risky the moment you post a photo publicly.

A geotagged photo shared online can reveal where you live, where your children go to school, or a friend’s home address, all readable by anyone who downloads the file. The Location tab in the tool shows you, before you share, whether a photo carries coordinates and exactly where they point — pinned on an OpenStreetMap view.

How to remove EXIF and metadata

Removing metadata is simple and, importantly, doesn’t change how your photo looks:

1. Open your photo and switch to the Remove tab.
2. Choose an output format — JPG, PNG, or WebP.
3. Click Download clean copy. A metadata-free version saves to your device.

Under the hood, the tool draws your image’s pixels onto a fresh canvas and re-encodes them. A newly encoded file starts with no metadata block at all, so the result has no EXIF, no GPS, no XMP, and no maker notes — while remaining pixel-for-pixel the same picture.

To prove it worked, drop the clean copy back in and open the Metadata tab: you should see “No metadata found.”

Does removing metadata hurt quality?

No — not in any way you’ll notice. If you save as PNG, the result is lossless: the pixels are identical to the original. If you save as JPG or WebP, the image is compressed once on the way out; keep the quality slider around 90 and the difference is invisible. Either way, the clean copy keeps the same dimensions as the source. If you also want a smaller file, run the result through the compress tool afterwards.

Dimensions and DPI: the other metadata

Not all metadata is sensitive. The Size & DPI tab surfaces the practical facts about an image:

• Pixel dimensions — the true width and height, and the megapixel count.
• Aspect ratio — simplified, like 4:3 or 16:9.
• DPI / resolution — a print-density tag that only matters when you print.

For anything on a screen, ignore DPI and look only at pixel dimensions. For printing, aim for around 300 DPI — a 3000 × 2000 px photo prints cleanly at roughly 10 × 7 inches. To change the actual size, use the resize tool.

Where does the processing happen?

Reading and removing metadata both happen in your browser, using the file APIs and the Canvas API — the clean copy is created on your own device. That’s faster than tools that round-trip your photo through a server just to read a few tags.

How any data associated with this tool is handled is described in our privacy policy. If you’re working with something highly sensitive, an offline desktop tool is always the most private option.

A few practical habits

• Check before you share. Make a quick look at the Location tab a habit before posting photos publicly.
• Strip, then archive. The clean copy is a new file; keep your original somewhere private if you want the data for your own records.
• Combine tools. Strip metadata here, then crop, resize, or compress the clean copy as needed.

View it, map it, then remove it. With those three steps the tool above turns an oversharing photo into a clean, private one in seconds.