How to Use This Tool
Every photo your phone takes carries a block of hidden data called EXIF. It records the camera, the exposure settings, the exact date and time, and — on almost every modern phone with location services on — the GPS coordinates where you were standing, accurate to a few metres. That data travels with the file when you email it, attach it to a marketplace listing or send it to someone you have never met.
See it before you strip it
Drop a photo in and the tool reads the EXIF block and shows you what is there. If coordinates are present you get a link that opens them on a map, because "GPS: 25.0330, 121.5654" means nothing until you see the pin land on a specific building. This ordering is deliberate: most people do not believe their photos carry their address until they watch the map open on it.
Then remove it
Press Clean and the photo is redrawn onto a canvas and re-encoded. That process copies only the pixels, so the metadata block simply does not exist in the output. The image looks identical; the file no longer knows anything about where or when it was taken, or what took it.
When this actually matters
- Selling something online. A photo of a bike taken in your hallway carries your home address to every person who views the listing, including the ones who want the bike but not from you.
- Anything involving a child. School uniforms and home locations are a combination worth removing before posting anywhere public.
- Journalism, activism, whistleblowing. The timestamp alone can identify a source. This is a genuinely serious case, and a browser tool is only part of the answer.
- Dating and rentals. Photos taken at home, sent to strangers, by definition.
What is preserved and what is lost
Orientation is read from EXIF and baked into the pixels before stripping, so photos that were correctly rotated stay correctly rotated — a common failure in simpler tools that end up producing sideways images. Colour profiles are not preserved: the output is sRGB, which is what browsers and most software assume anyway. If you are working with Display P3 photographs for print, strip a copy rather than the original.
Re-encoding is lossy for JPEG, so there is a small quality cost. The tool uses quality 92, which is high enough that the difference is invisible on a photograph, and the output is usually slightly smaller than the input because modern encoders are better than most phone cameras'.
