EXIF Stripper

How to Use the EXIF Stripper

1. Drop your photo into the upload area. JPEG, PNG, WebP, and HEIC inputs are all accepted. Files up to 100 MB go through in a single request.
2. Review the metadata categories the strip will remove. EXIF (camera, lens, ISO, shutter), GPS (latitude, longitude, altitude), software tags, XMP and IPTC sidecars, and embedded thumbnails are all in scope.
3. Click Strip metadata. The pixel data is unchanged; only the metadata blocks are dropped. The operation runs on our EU servers.
4. Download the clean file. The download URL is signed and valid for 15 minutes; after that the input and the output are both deleted.

Why EXIF Is Worth Removing

Every photo from a modern phone or camera ships with an EXIF block - a structured table of tags that describe the conditions of the capture. Tags like GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude, DateTimeOriginal, Make, Model, LensModel, Software, and Artist are routine. They are useful inside a photo management app, where the data drives map views and lens-based filters. They become a privacy problem the moment the photo leaves that managed environment - posted on a forum, attached to an issue tracker, shared in a chat, used as a profile picture. A geotag pins a home address to a few metres; a timestamp builds a schedule; a software string fingerprints the device down to a build number. Social platforms vary wildly in how much they strip on upload, and even when they strip the public copy, the original often sits in a "raw upload" bucket with metadata intact. Stripping before upload eliminates the ambiguity.

The Thumbnail Trap

An EXIF JPEG also typically embeds a small (160 px-ish) full-colour thumbnail used by photo apps for fast scrolling. This thumbnail is written when the photo is first captured and is not regenerated when the main image is edited. So a photo where the user blurred out a face in Photoshop and re-saved as JPEG can still leak the original unblurred face through the EXIF thumbnail. Specialised image viewers reveal this routinely; a generic browser viewer does not, which is why most people never notice. The EXIF stripper removes the thumbnail along with the rest of the metadata block.

Common Stripping Scenarios

• Cleaning vacation photos before uploading to a public Reddit thread or Imgur album.
• Removing the home GPS coordinates from a real estate listing photo taken inside an apartment.
• Stripping a photo used as a dating app profile picture so a screenshot reposted elsewhere cannot reveal location.
• Cleaning screenshots of a colleague's whiteboard where the camera EXIF would identify the device model.
• Submitting evidence photos to a public document drop where the timestamp would compromise the source.
• Publishing photojournalism where the EXIF software string would identify a particular newsroom workflow.
• Sharing wedding photos in a private cloud album where the host might index EXIF for analytics.

What This Tool Keeps and What It Drops

The strip-exif operation drops every metadata sidecar block the encoder recognises - EXIF, XMP, IPTC, PNG tEXt/zTXt/iTXt/eXIf chunks, and the embedded thumbnail. The only metadata it explicitly keeps is the ICC colour profile, because dropping a colour profile silently desaturates wide-gamut photos on a Display P3 screen and that is a different bug from the privacy issue we are fixing. If you want the colour profile removed too (rare but valid for sRGB-only output pipelines), run ImageMagick locally with magick mogrify -strip *.jpg, which drops both metadata and ICC.

Privacy and Operational Notes

Files are processed on EU servers; both the upload and the cleaned output are deleted from disk 15 minutes after they are created. Signed download URLs expire when the file is removed; nothing is cached longer. The pipeline does not log image content or metadata values, only request shape (op name, file size, duration) for monitoring. Typical run time is under a second on a 12-megapixel photo because the operation is mostly I/O - read the file, drop the metadata atoms, write the file back. HEIC inputs are slower because the container has to be re-encoded; HEIC output is transcoded to JPEG (also stripped) because most browsers cannot display HEIC directly.

Verify the Strip Worked

After downloading the clean copy, run the original and the result through the Image Metadata Viewer. The viewer parses EXIF in the browser without uploading and shows you exactly which tags survived. A clean output shows only essential format markers and the ICC profile - no GPS, no timestamps, no camera model, no embedded thumbnail. If you want a second-line check, ExifTool on the command line is the canonical inspector: exiftool clean.jpg should list only the file system and basic format tags.