Real image cleaning — strip hidden metadata, GPS, and threats from your photos, entirely on your device.

Free EXIF & Metadata Remover for Photos

Every photo carries more than the picture. This page exists to show you exactly what, in plain language, before you decide what to do about it.

Checking network activity…

That number isn't a promise, it's a live measurement of this exact page, right now. Want to go further? Turn off your WiFi after this page finishes loading, then process a photo anyway - it'll keep working, because it never needed a connection to do the job. This matters because it's not always true elsewhere: the FBI has warned about free online converters that work as advertised while quietly doing more in the background.

It's also why there are no ads on this page. An ad is a third party's script, running here, with its own network access - structurally the same risk as a hidden data-collection scheme, just wearing a friendlier hat. A privacy tool that loads an ad network is making a promise its own page doesn't keep. This one has nothing to sell your attention to, so there's nothing here that could quietly do more than advertised either.

Can a photo actually attack your device?

Not by itself, and not the way that sounds. A plain image sitting on your screen cannot switch on your camera or microphone - that would require your device to run hidden code, and a picture is data, not a program. Be skeptical of anything that claims otherwise without explaining the mechanism.

Here's the part that's still genuinely worth taking seriously, though: getting a device to run hidden code disguised as an image is a real, well-documented attack category, and it has happened at scale. Image-processing software has a real history of serious security flaws - in 2016, a vulnerability nicknamed "ImageTragick" (CVE-2016-3714) in a widely used image library let a specially crafted image file run commands on the server that processed it, and it was found being exploited in the real world. Once an attacker gets code running that way, everything downstream - camera, microphone, files, everything - is back on the table, the same as any other malware. The image itself doesn't spy on you; a successful exploit hiding inside it is the door, not the spy.

This is exactly the category of attack this tool's core design defends against. It never trusts a single byte of the original file - every image is decoded down to raw pixels through a memory-safe decoder with hard resource limits, then rebuilt completely from scratch. Whatever might have been hiding in the original bytes has no path forward, because the part of the file that would matter never reaches anything capable of running it.

Learn what's really in your photos

01 What's hiding in your photos

Camera model, exact GPS coordinates, embedded thumbnails - what's actually inside the file, and how a leftover thumbnail can prove a photo was edited.

Read the full explanation →

02 What happens when you hit send

Most platforms strip location data automatically - and destroy signed authenticity credentials in the process. Here's what actually survives, platform by platform.

Read the full explanation →

03 Your photos and AI training

What Meta actually does with public photos, how the opt-out works, and the one thing it doesn't undo.

Read the full explanation →

04 Can you still trust a photo?

Less than most tools admit. The three real detection approaches, and exactly where each one breaks down.

Read the full explanation →
You can't undo a photo that's already out there. You can control every photo before it leaves your hands. See exactly what it's carrying, strip it, and decide what actually goes out - every time.
Disarm a photo now ↓

+ It also makes files smaller - here are real numbers, not a marketing claim

Measured by actually running this tool's own test suite against a realistic synthetic photo (3000×2000, with a typical amount of EXIF/ICC bloat spliced in) - reproduce it yourself with cargo run --release --example filesize_savings in cdr-core/.

PresetResultWhat it's for
Original1.55 MBunprocessed, with metadata
Lossless2.07 MB (+33%)maximum fidelity - not for saving space
Balanced554.7 KB (−65%)the default - smaller, visually near-identical
Super compressed173.5 KB (−89%)when size matters most

Note the honest part: Lossless mode came out larger than the original here, because it prioritizes fidelity over size (quality 95 vs. the original's quality 92) - metadata removal alone doesn't outweigh that. Balanced and Super Compressed both cut real weight while stripping every byte of metadata regardless. Your own results will vary by photo; the point is these are real runs, not assumed numbers.

Further reading (not affiliated with this project): TechCrunch on Meta's AI opt-out, Malwarebytes on Meta's Muse Image feature, what survives an upload to major platforms.

How this compares

See the full comparison to ExifTool, ExifCleaner, PrivMeta, and enterprise CDR tools →

A sourced, feature-by-feature breakdown - not "we're better," but exactly which technique each tool actually uses and where that matters.

Intake

Drop one image, or several, or click to choose
JPEG · PNG · GIF · WebP · HEIC/HEIF · AVIF · JXL* · ICO · BMP · TIFF · SVG · QOI · PNM · TGA

Options

Resize
Destroys any data hidden in the lowest-order pixel bits. Higher settings visibly soften flat-color images.
All three are opt-in - see the footnote for why.

Support this tool

Free: 1 full use included, no account needed. Unlock unlimited use for $9, one-time, whenever you like.

Unlock unlimited use - $9

This is a one-time Stripe payment, not a subscription and not a license key - no account, no verification, nothing checked against a server. It's a "please pay if you find this useful" nudge, not a lock: this page never talks to a server for anything, ever, so there's nothing here to actually enforce it against a determined person. That's the deliberate cost of keeping this tool's real promise intact - your image genuinely never leaves this tab, paid or not.

Inspection ticket

Choose a file to begin.
Everything above runs locally in this browser tab via WebAssembly. No image data is uploaded anywhere, and nothing here writes to a database. * AVIF and HEIC both work by decoding through the browser itself before the real sanitize pipeline runs - see by format for how each one actually works. JXL support is enabled in the build but its own threading dependency's WASM behavior hasn't been independently confirmed - if it fails to load, that's the likely reason; every other format here is unaffected either way.