EXIF Viewer & Metadata Remover
Every photo a phone or camera takes carries a block of hidden data: which camera and lens, the exposure settings, the exact second it was taken, and — often — the coordinates of where you were standing. This tool parses that block and shows it grouped, then offers a copy with all of it removed. The file is read and re-encoded inside this browser tab; it is never uploaded, which is rather the point for a tool about photo privacy.
Drop a photo to read its metadata
JPEG and TIFF carry EXIF; PNG and WEBP do not. Up to 50.0 MB. The file is read inside this browser tab and never uploaded.
Nothing read yet. Drop a photo above — the bytes are parsed inside this browser tab, so the file never leaves your device.
Publishing the photo somewhere?
Once the file is safe to send, Moda turns it into the post, page, or deck you needed it for.
Try Moda free →What EXIF actually records
EXIF is a block of tagged values written into the file alongside the image, defined for JPEG and TIFF and not used by PNG, WEBP, or GIF at all. The technical half is what photographers want: camera make and model, lens, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, metering, whether the flash fired. The other half is what matters for privacy: a timestamp accurate to the second, sometimes a device serial number or the name of the software that edited the file, and on almost every phone with location services on, GPS coordinates precise to a few metres. None of it is visible when you look at the picture, and all of it travels with the file.
Why GPS in a photo is worth taking seriously
Coordinates are not "roughly the city" — they are precise enough to point at a building. A photo taken at home and sent to a stranger hands over a home address; a set of photos hands over a routine. Large social platforms strip EXIF from what you upload, so people reasonably assume it is handled everywhere, but the places a file most often travels intact are exactly the personal ones: email attachments, chat apps that send "as a file" rather than as a compressed image, cloud share links, marketplace listings, and forum uploads. If a photo is going somewhere you do not control, strip it first.
How the clean copy is produced
The copy is not the original with tags deleted — it is a new file. Your browser decodes the image to raw pixels, draws them onto a canvas, and encodes that canvas afresh. The encoder writes only image data, so there is nothing for EXIF, XMP, or maker notes to survive in; it is the same reason converting a photo in any browser-based tool loses its metadata. One thing is deliberately preserved: orientation. The rotation flag is applied to the pixels during decoding, so a photo that was stored sideways with a "rotate me" tag comes out genuinely upright rather than sideways-with-the-tag-gone.
The tradeoff in the clean copy
Because the file is re-encoded, a JPEG saved as JPEG goes through a second lossy pass. At 92% quality that is invisible in normal viewing and worth it; if you need certainty that no pixel changed, save as PNG instead — lossless, and typically several times larger for a photograph. What no option here does is edit the original file in place. You always get a separate copy, so the version with its metadata intact is still on your disk if you wanted it for your own records.
Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded to read its metadata?
No, and a tool that reads the coordinates out of your photos had better be able to say so plainly. The file is opened as raw bytes and its EXIF block is walked by code running on your machine; the stripped copy is built by the same browser that drew this page. A metadata remover that uploaded your photo first would be handing someone the exact thing you came here to get rid of. Reading a file costs no network traffic at all; producing a clean copy of a HEIC downloads a decoder for it, which sends nothing.
Why does my image show no EXIF at all?
Several ordinary reasons. PNG, WEBP, and GIF do not carry EXIF by design. Screenshots have none, because no camera took them. And a JPEG that has passed through a social platform, a messaging app, or any tool that re-encoded it has already had its metadata dropped — which is exactly what the clean-copy button here does deliberately.
Does removing EXIF change how the photo looks?
Not visibly. The pixels are re-encoded, so a JPEG-to-JPEG copy is technically a second compression pass, but at the default quality that is not something you can see. The one visible change is a good one: a photo whose rotation lived only in an orientation tag comes out actually upright, so it can no longer appear sideways in software that ignores the tag.
Can I remove metadata from several photos at once?
Not on this page — it is built to show you one file's data in detail. For a batch, the image converter and the image compressor both re-encode through the same pipeline and drop metadata as a side effect, so running thirty photos through either of them and keeping the results gives you thirty clean files.
Is the location the only private thing in there?
It is the sharpest, but not the only one. Timestamps establish when you were somewhere. Camera make, model, and in some files a serial number link separate photos to the same device. Software tags reveal what edited the file. Maker notes — a manufacturer-specific blob this viewer does not decode — can hold more still. The clean copy removes all of it, including everything not listed on this page, because it rebuilds the file from pixels rather than editing tags out one at a time.