EXIF viewer
Read the EXIF metadata in a photo, including GPS coordinates, and strip it losslessly. Nothing is uploaded.
Runs in your browser
Pick a JPEG. It is read on your device and never uploaded.
The image data is copied byte for byte, so nothing is re-encoded and no quality is lost.
The orientation tag is preserved, so a portrait photo stays portrait.
Everything happens in this page. A geotagged photo is exactly the file you should not hand to a server to find out whether it is geotagged.
The absurdity this fixes
To find out whether a photo reveals where you live, most tools require you to upload the photo that reveals where you live.
That is the whole reason this page exists. It reads the file in your browser and sends nothing anywhere — a browser test asserts that opening a photo issues no network request at all.
What EXIF actually contains
Far more than most people expect. Beyond the obvious camera settings:
- GPS coordinates, to within a few metres, on nearly every photo taken with a phone that has not had location switched off for the camera.
- The exact date and time, to the second.
- The camera’s serial number, and often the lens’s. These are stable across every photo that camera has ever taken, which is enough to link a set of anonymous images to each other and to any photo you have posted with your name on it.
- The owner’s name, if it was ever set in the camera.
- The software used to edit it, and sometimes a thumbnail of the original image — which survives cropping, so a cropped photo can still contain the uncropped version.
Location and identifying tags are marked in the list.
What social platforms do, and do not do
Most large platforms strip EXIF when you upload. That is not protection you can rely on:
- Messaging apps vary. Some strip, some do not, and “send as file” usually bypasses whatever stripping the app does for photos.
- Email attachments are untouched.
- Cloud storage links preserve everything.
- Platforms that strip it from the displayed image have still received the original, and their stripping is a courtesy rather than a promise.
The reliable approach is to remove it before the file leaves your machine.
Stripping is lossless here
The image data is copied byte for byte. Only the metadata segments are removed, and the entropy-coded scan — the actual picture — is untouched, so nothing is re-encoded and no quality is lost.
Most tools that “remove EXIF” decode and re-encode the JPEG, which strips the metadata and quietly degrades the image at the same time. For a privacy tool that is a poor trade when it is avoidable.
Two things are deliberately kept:
- The orientation tag, so a portrait photo does not come back sideways.
- The quantisation and Huffman tables, which the file needs to decode at all.
Everything else goes, including APP13 (IPTC, which carries captions, names and locations) and any comment segment.
PNG, HEIC and the rest
This handles JPEG, which is what phones and cameras produce and what carries EXIF in the form described here.
PNG can carry metadata in text chunks, HEIC uses a different container entirely, and RAW formats embed far more than either. They are not covered here — but note that converting a HEIC to JPEG usually carries the EXIF across, so a converted photo is not a cleaned one.
Nothing is uploaded
Read and written entirely in this page.