EXIF Data Viewer & Remover

Most cameras and phones write far more into a JPEG file than just the picture. Tucked inside a segment near the start of the file sits a block of structured metadata — the EXIF standard — recording things like the camera or phone model, the lens, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, the exact date and time the shutter was pressed, and, if location services were on, GPS coordinates precise enough to identify a specific room in a specific building. None of this is visible when you look at the image; it just rides along invisibly until someone opens the file with a tool that reads it.

This tool parses that structure directly — walking the JPEG's marker segments to find the APP1 block, then reading the TIFF/IFD directory format EXIF is built on to pull out and label the tags that matter: camera and lens details, exposure settings, capture date, and GPS latitude/longitude/altitude, converted from the raw degree-minute-second rationals EXIF stores into a plain decimal coordinate you can drop straight into a map. It also separately detects XMP metadata (Adobe's newer sidecar format, often holding editing history or ratings) and IPTC/Photoshop metadata (often captions or copyright info), since either can also carry identifying details.

The removal side works differently from most "metadata scrubbers," which quietly re-encode the whole image — a lossy operation that degrades quality even if the change is subtle. Because JPEG stores its compressed picture data as a single continuous block after the header segments, this tool only needs to identify which metadata segments to drop and copy everything else byte-for-byte, including the entire compressed scan. The pixels you download are bit-for-bit identical to your original; only the metadata block itself is gone.

Every part of this — reading the file, decoding the TIFF structure, and rebuilding the cleaned JPEG — happens locally in your browser. That matters most for exactly the files this tool is built around: photos that, by definition, can carry your location history if you don't check first.