A photo of your dog in the garden can quietly say where your garden is. Most phones attach location and camera details to every picture, and not every site you upload to removes them. Looking at what a photo reveals is a ten-second check.
What is inside
EXIF is a block of metadata stored in the image file. The EXIF Viewer shows what it finds: camera make and model, the date and time the photo was taken, the orientation, and GPS coordinates if the camera recorded them. Our EXIF glossary entry explains each field.
How to view and remove it
- Open the EXIF Viewer and choose a JPEG file. Other formats are not supported by this tool.
- Select View & Remove. The tool lists the metadata it found.
- Download the cleaned copy. The original stays untouched on your device.
The file is read and rewritten inside your browser, so the photo is not uploaded.
What the cleaned copy is
The tool draws the picture onto a canvas and saves it again as a JPEG at 95% quality, which discards the metadata along with everything else that is not pixels. That means a fresh compression pass, so the file size changes and you lose a tiny amount of detail. For sharing, you will almost never notice; for archiving originals, keep the untouched file.
When it matters most
- Home and work. Photos taken at home, a school or a workplace can reveal the address through GPS data.
- Marketplace and classified listings. Sellers often post straight from their phones.
- Anyone you do not know. Treat photos sent to strangers the same way.
Some social networks remove location data when you upload, but practice varies and can change, so you should not assume it. Check what a file contains before you send it somewhere that matters.
Stopping it at the source
Most phones let you switch off location tagging for the camera app in the system settings, which prevents GPS data from being written in the first place. After stripping a file, you can load the cleaned copy into the viewer again to confirm that the camera, date and location lines are gone.