Remove EXIF data from photos

A photograph taken on a phone carries a metadata block alongside the pixels. It typically records the camera make and model, the lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO and whether the flash fired; the date and time to the second; the orientation the camera was held in; the software the file has passed through; and, if location services were enabled, the latitude, longitude and altitude where the shutter was pressed.

Some files also embed a thumbnail preview, which has a long history of still showing the image as it was before it was edited.

GPS coordinates in a photograph are typically accurate to a few metres — enough to identify a specific house. People photograph things at home constantly: an item for sale, a pet, a document, a room. When that file is posted publicly, the coordinates go with it, and anyone who downloads it can read them in seconds with free tools and no expertise.

Large social platforms strip metadata on upload, which has made this feel solved. It is not. Files sent by email or messaging apps, uploaded to forums and smaller sites, attached to marketplace listings or shared in cloud folders very often keep everything.

There are two ways to remove metadata. One is to edit the file's headers in place, leaving the compressed image data untouched — genuinely lossless, but it requires parsing and rewriting each format's container by hand. The other is to decode the image to raw pixels and write a completely new file, which cannot carry anything across because nothing copies it.

This tool does the second, because it is what a browser can do reliably across every format. The trade-off is a re-encode, which is why there is a quality setting here at all. At 92 the change is invisible; the honest thing is to tell you it happened rather than to imply the file was untouched.

One benefit of the re-encode: orientation is baked into the pixels before saving, so a portrait photograph cannot end up sideways the way it can when an orientation tag is deleted carelessly.

Better than cleaning files afterwards is not recording the location in the first place.

iOS

Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera, then choose Never.

Android

Open the Camera app's own settings and turn off location tags or "save location".

Both can be switched on for a trip and off again afterwards. Keep EXIF in your personal library, where the dates make it searchable years later; strip it from everything you publish or send.