Remove metadata from a photo

Every photograph your phone takes carries a block of EXIF metadata, and its contents surprise most people. The GPS coordinates where the shutter fired, to a precision of a few metres. The exact date and time, to the second. The camera make, model and serial number. The lens. The software version. On many devices, a thumbnail of the original image, which survives even when the visible image has been cropped or edited.

The serial number is the field people never think about, and it is the one that links photographs together. Two images posted to different places under different names, with no visible connection, share a camera serial and are therefore the same camera. Researchers and law enforcement both use exactly this. The GPS field is more obvious and no less consequential: a photograph of an item for sale, taken at home, publishes your home.

Where this leaks is not usually social media. The large platforms strip EXIF on upload, which has trained people to assume it is handled. It is not handled anywhere else: email attachments keep it, messaging apps that send "as a document" keep it, marketplace listings on smaller sites keep it, and a file handed to someone on a USB stick obviously keeps it. The habit of assuming the platform will clean up is the risk.

Stripping metadata is not the same as re-encoding. This tool rewrites the container and drops the metadata segments, leaving the compressed image data untouched, so the picture that comes out is bit-for-bit the picture that went in. Re-encoding would degrade the image slightly on every pass and would be the wrong tool for a job that is purely about what is attached to the file.

One field is worth keeping deliberately: orientation. EXIF orientation tells a viewer to rotate the image, and removing it without applying the rotation first produces photographs that arrive sideways. That rotation is applied rather than discarded, which is the difference between a file that is clean and a file that is clean and still correct.