Remove EXIF data and GPS location from a photo, without re-compressing it

What EXIF, XMP and IPTC are

A photo file carries two things: the compressed picture, and a set of labelled notes about it. Those notes come in three families. EXIF is written by the camera or phone at the moment of capture: make and model, lens, exposure, the date and time to the second, the orientation, and — if location services were on — a GPS position. XMP is an XML packet added by editing and cataloguing software such as Lightroom or Photoshop: the editing history, ratings, keywords, the creator’s name. IPTC is the older press standard for captions, bylines, copyright and contact details, still written by newsroom and stock-photo tools.

None of this is visible when you look at the picture, and all of it travels with the file wherever the file goes.

Where the metadata lives inside the file

Each format stores it in its own kind of container, which is what makes a clean, lossless removal possible.

• JPEG is a sequence of marker segments before the compressed scan. EXIF sits in an APP1 segment that starts with Exif; XMP sits in another APP1 segment identified by the Adobe XMP namespace; IPTC sits inside Photoshop’s APP13 segment. Comments use a COM segment, and EXIF often embeds a small preview thumbnail — a second copy of the photo that some tools forget.
• PNG is a sequence of chunks. EXIF has its own eXIf chunk; text, including XMP, goes in tEXt, zTXt or iTXt chunks; tIME records when the image was last modified.
• WebP is a RIFF file. In the extended format, EXIF and XMP are separate EXIF and XMP  chunks alongside the image data.

Because the metadata is in its own segments or chunks, it can be cut out and the remaining pieces joined back together without touching the image data between them.

What GPS metadata really exposes

A phone with location enabled for the camera writes latitude and longitude, usually to a few metres, often with altitude, direction and a timestamp from the satellite fix. Paste those numbers into any map and you get a pin. One photo of a garden or a living room is enough to reveal a home address; a handful taken on weekday mornings reveals a school or an office. Combined with the capture time and the exact phone model, the file answers where you were, when, and on what device.

This page shows the position it finds as plain coordinates and never loads a map or makes a request with them: the numbers stay in your tab.

Why lossless removal beats “save as”, a screenshot or re-encoding

The common workarounds all decode the picture and compress it again. That has two costs.

• Quality. JPEG and lossy WebP throw detail away every time they are encoded. Re-saving a photo — through an editor, a canvas in a web page, or a screenshot — adds a second generation of loss and can soften fine texture or add blocky artefacts. A screenshot also changes the resolution to your screen’s.
• It may not remove the metadata. Whether a re-save keeps EXIF depends on the app and its settings. Many editors copy the original EXIF and XMP into the new file by default, sometimes adding their own software tag on top. You end up with a worse picture that still carries its location.

Removing the segments directly avoids both. The compressed image data is copied byte for byte, so the pixels in the clean file are identical to the original, and the only bytes that change are the ones that were metadata. The file usually gets slightly smaller.

Why the colour profile and orientation are kept

Two pieces of embedded information describe how to display the picture rather than who took it.

The ICC colour profile says what the colour numbers mean. Photos from recent phones are often in a wide-gamut space such as Display P3; strip the profile and a viewer assumes sRGB, so reds and greens can look dull or shifted. The profile describes a colour space shared by millions of devices, not you, so it stays.

Orientation is a single number. Phones usually save a portrait photo with the sensor’s landscape layout and set this flag to say “rotate on display”. Remove it with the rest and the photo appears sideways in every viewer. With Keep orientation on, a JPEG keeps a minimal EXIF block containing only that one tag — no date, no device, no position. Turn it off if you want no EXIF at all and the photo is already upright.

Which platforms strip metadata, and which don’t

Large public social feeds — Facebook, Instagram and X among them — remove EXIF, including GPS, from the copy of a photo they show to other people. That protection is narrower than it sounds.

• The platform still receives the original. Stripping happens after upload, on their servers.
• Messaging depends on how you send. WhatsApp compresses photos sent the normal way and drops their EXIF, but a photo sent as a document — the usual trick to avoid compression — arrives as the original file with its metadata intact.
• Files sent as files are untouched. Email attachments, and sharing links from cloud storage such as Google Drive or Dropbox, deliver the exact file you uploaded.
• Photo communities may display it. Flickr stores the EXIF of uploads and can show it, including location, unless you change the account’s privacy settings.

Forums, marketplaces, dating profiles, job portals and self-hosted sites vary, and change their pipelines without notice. Removing the metadata yourself means you don’t have to know which route strips what.

What removing metadata can’t do

This removes information stored inside the file. It cannot remove information that is visible in the picture: faces, a house number, a street sign, a school logo, the view from a window, a reflection, or a screen with an email open. Look at the photo itself before you share it. Crop or blur what gives you away first, then remove the metadata from the result — editing apps add their own tags when they save.

It also cannot reach copies that already exist. A photo that was shared before it was cleaned keeps its metadata wherever it was sent.

Formats this page handles

JPEG, PNG and WebP are cleaned losslessly. HEIC, the iPhone’s default, and AVIF keep metadata inside a nested box structure that can’t yet be rewritten here without risking the file, so they are refused rather than half-cleaned. Export a HEIC photo as JPEG first — or set the iPhone camera to Most Compatible for new photos — and clean the JPEG.