EXIF Data Remover &
Metadata Privacy Guide
Strip hidden GPS, camera details, and timestamps from your photos. Protect your identity and location before sharing images online.
Check for Hidden Data
Upload an image to see exactly what hidden information it contains.
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When you take a photo, your phone records more than just a picture. It embeds Hidden Metadata including your exact GPS coordinates, the date and time, your device's unique serial number, and even your home address if location services are active.
Our EXIF Scrubber is an essential tool for privacy-conscious users. It allows you to "cleanse" your images, ensuring that you're only sharing the pixels, not your personal life's telemetry.
GPS Location Blocking
Prevent "Doxing." By removing GPS tags, you ensure that people can't backtrack your photos to your home, office, or children's school.
Anonymize Hardware
Camera serial numbers can be used to link multiple photos across different platforms. Scrubbing these tags breaks the paper trail and preserves your anonymity.
What We Remove
Our tool standardizes on the NIST-approved metadata removal protocol, targeting 100% of sensitive fields.
Metadata Risk Assessment
| Tag Category | Sensitivity | Privacy Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Image Resolution | Low | Negligible |
| Timestamp | Medium | Temporal Tracking |
| GPS Coordinates | Critical | Physical Stalking |
The Insider’s Privacy Strategy
Why "Auto-Scrubbing" Platforms Aren't Enough
Facebook, Instagram, and X (Twitter) claim to scrub EXIF data upon upload. The Strategic Reality: You shouldn't trust them with your raw data in the first place.
- Server-Side Storage:Even if the data is hidden from the public, the platform still has a copy of your GPS and device info on their servers for ad-targeting and profiling.
- The "Golden Rule":Scrub your photos locally before they ever hit the cloud. This ensures that no entity other than you knows the origin story of your visual data.
The Anatomy of a Meta-Tag
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data is stored in the APP1 marker of a JPEG file. Our scrubber works by parsing the TIFF structure of the image, identifying the "Image File Directory" (IFD) entries, and stripping out pointers to sensitive tags.
By zeroing out these offsets or removing the entire APP1 segment, we ensure that GPS coordinates, camera serial numbers, and software signatures are permanently deleted. This is a destructive process at the binary level, meaning the data cannot be recovered once scrubbed.
When to Scrub Your Data
| Context | Risk Level | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Selling on Craigslist / Marketplace | HIGH | CRITICAL. Prevents buyers from seeing your exact home address. |
| Professional Portfolio | MEDIUM | RECOMMENDED. Keeps your internal file naming and edit history private. |
| Personal Backup (Cloud) | LOW | OPTIONAL. Useful for organizing your own memories by date/location. |
Related Tools
Does scrubbing reduce image quality?
No. EXIF data is stored in the header of the file, completely separate from the actual pixel data. Stripping it has zero impact on the sharpness, color, or resolution of your image.
Can I recover metadata once it's scrubbed?
No. Our tool permanently deletes the APP1 segment and overwrites the metadata indices. Once you download the scrubbed version, the old data is gone forever.
What is the difference between EXIF and Metadata?
EXIF is a specific standard for camera data. 'Metadata' is the broad term that includes EXIF, IPTC (copyright info), and XMP (Adobe's editing history). Our tool clears all common privacy-leaking metadata types.
Is this tool safe for lawyers and journalists?
Yes. Because the scrubbing happens entirely in your browser's memory, your sensitive evidence never touches our servers, making it ideal for high-security workflows.
Should I scrub my wedding photos?
If you are sharing them on public forums or the open web, yes. Professional photo edits often contain the photographer's internal file paths and software versions which can be used in social engineering attacks.
Privacy & Metadata Glossary
EXIF
Exchangeable Image File Format. The standard for storing interchange information in image files, especially those using JPEG compression.
GPS Tag
Latitude, Longitude, and Altitude data generated by your device's satellite navigation array and burned into the image header.
Metadata Forensics
The practice of analyzing hidden data in files to determine the device, location, and identity of the file's creator.
IPTC
A metadata standard used by news agencies and photographers to store copyright, captions, and keywords.
Client-Side Forensics Defense
Our scrubber uses a non-destructive Header Overwrite methodology. We parse the file as an ArrayBuffer and surgically remove the TIFF metadata segments without re-encoding the image. This guarantees that your original JPEG quality is preserved while your privacy is fully armored.