Clean QOI ("Quite OK Image") Files
13 A young format built for one job: fast, simple, lossless
QOI ("Quite OK Image") is a genuinely recent format, first published in 2021, designed around a single
goal - a lossless image codec simple enough to implement in a few hundred lines of code while
compressing and decompressing dramatically faster than PNG. It's shown up mostly in game engines, small
graphics tools, and hobbyist/embedded projects rather than cameras, phones, or social platforms - if you
have a .qoi file, it almost certainly came from a developer tool, not a photo.
Go deeper: why "remove the metadata" barely applies here
QOI's specification is deliberately tiny, and it shows: there's no ancillary chunk system like
PNG's tEXt/iCCP, no EXIF-equivalent block, nothing resembling a place to
attach GPS coordinates or camera information in the first place. The file is a fixed 14-byte header
(width, height, channel count, colorspace flag) followed directly by pixel data and an 8-byte end
marker - there simply isn't a metadata slot in this format for anything to hide in. That doesn't
make a QOI file automatically safe, though: any container format can still carry data appended past
its own defined end marker, the same poliglot-style risk this site treats consistently across every
format. Full decode-and-rebuild handles that the same way here as everywhere else, even though
there's no metadata payload to speak of removing.
What actually matters for a QOI file
Given how little there is to strip, the value of running a QOI file through this tool is almost entirely the structural guarantee described in the comparison page - decode fully to raw pixels, rebuild from nothing, so whatever bytes might be trailing after a QOI file's end marker never reach anything capable of acting on them. If you're working with QOI files as part of a development pipeline rather than sharing photos, that structural safety is the actual reason to run them through here at all.