How to Remove EXIF Data from Photos Before Sharing

EXIF is the block of technical data your camera or phone writes into every photo. It was designed for photographers who wanted to know which settings produced a good shot. Over time it absorbed a lot more, and today it's the most common way personal information leaks out of an image.

What EXIF can reveal

• Location: latitude and longitude, often accurate to a few metres, plus altitude and the direction the camera faced.
• Device identity: make, model, lens and on many cameras a body serial number that links every photo you've taken with that camera.
• Time: the date and time the photo was taken and last edited, sometimes with your time zone offset.
• Software: the editing apps you used and their versions.
• Ownership: artist and copyright fields, which some cameras fill in automatically with your name.
• A hidden preview: a small embedded thumbnail that, in some older editing workflows, still shows the image before it was cropped.

Option 1: Windows File Explorer

Right-click the image, choose Properties, open the Details tab and select 'Remove Properties and Personal Information'. You can create a cleaned copy or strip selected fields. It works for JPEGs, but it doesn't reliably reach XMP, IPTC or AI-specific data, and it doesn't handle PNG text fields.

Option 2: macOS Preview

In Preview, Tools then Show Inspector lets you view EXIF and remove location info. It doesn't remove the rest. Exporting from Photos with 'Include location information' unticked helps for location only.

Option 3: on your phone

iOS lets you turn off location for a single photo from the share sheet under Options. Android varies by manufacturer; many galleries have a 'remove location data' toggle when sharing. Both leave the device and timestamp data in place.

Option 4: a dedicated metadata cleaner

A dedicated tool removes every metadata block at once: EXIF, GPS, XMP, IPTC, comments, thumbnails and AI data. The important question to ask of any such tool is whether it re-encodes your image. Many online tools open the image and save it again, which silently recompresses a JPEG and costs quality every time.

Our metadata cleaner works differently. It rewrites the file's container and copies the compressed image data untouched, then decodes both versions and confirms every pixel matches before you download. It keeps only what your image needs to display correctly: the colour profile and, where needed, the orientation flag.

Check your work

After cleaning, run the file through a scanner again. You should see no location, no device, no names and no dates. If you want a second opinion, the free command-line tool ExifTool will list anything that remains.