Strip the metadata. Keep the pixels.

Exchangeable Image File Format — a block of structured data inside JPEG and PNG files that records camera make/model, exposure settings, lens info, software versions, timestamps, and (often) GPS coordinates. It's not pixels — you can strip it without changing what the photo looks like.

No. The file is read into your browser as a byte stream, parsed locally to find metadata segments, and re-emitted with those segments removed. Your photo never touches our servers — we don't run an image pipeline at all.

For JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF: yes. The metadata sits in its own segments or chunks, so we copy the compressed image data across untouched and drop the wrappers around it. Nothing is re-compressed and the file decodes to identical pixels. HEIC and AVIF have to be decoded to be cleaned, so those come out as a freshly written JPG — cleaned, but re-compressed once.

JPG: APP1 to APP15 (Exif, XMP, IPTC/Photoshop, Adobe, MPF, vendor blocks), the COM comment segment, and anything appended after the end-of-image marker — motion photos hide a whole second file there, with its own tags. PNG: tEXt, zTXt, iTXt, eXIf, tIME and dSIG, including the Exif block that some editors smuggle into a chunk labelled as text. WebP: the EXIF and XMP chunks, plus the VP8X flag bits that advertise them. GIF: comment and application extension blocks. The JFIF header stays because it is pixel density and nothing else, and the ICC colour profile stays unless you untick it — it describes colours, not you.

Major social platforms strip EXIF on upload — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit. But: emails, Slack DMs, file-share links, AirDrop, Google Drive, and most websites do not. If your photo will live anywhere outside a major social feed, strip first.

Yes. HEIC files are decoded in the browser and written back out as a clean JPG, and the Exif is read out of the HEIC first so you can see the GPS before you strip it. If your phone is set to save JPG rather than HEIC, that path is the lossless byte-level one.

Phone cameras embed latitude/longitude with sub-meter precision when location services are enabled. A photo posted publicly with GPS reveals exactly where you stood when you took it — your home, your kid's school, the trail you hike weekly. The other fields leak less, but GPS is the headline.

The tool does it for you: before handing over the download it re-reads its own output byte by byte and reports what is left, so the line you see after the strip is a measurement rather than a promise. To check independently, drop the clean copy back in — the manifest should be empty — or run ExifTool over it on the desktop.