What your photographs are carrying
A photograph taken on a phone arrives with a great deal more than pixels. Typically: the GPS coordinates where it was taken, accurate to a few metres. The date and time to the second. The device make and model. The lens, aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Often the software that last touched it, and sometimes a thumbnail of the original image from before you edited it.
None of that is visible. All of it travels with the file when you upload it, email it or send it to someone.
The location data is the part that matters most. A photograph of something inside your home carries the coordinates of your home, and a photograph of a child at their school carries the coordinates of that school. Several social platforms strip metadata on upload; many services do not, and file-sharing links almost never do.
How stripping works here
The image is drawn onto a canvas and read back out. That single step removes everything, because a canvas holds pixels and nothing else — there is nowhere for coordinates or timestamps to live.
It is a reliable method precisely because it does not attempt to edit the metadata. Nothing is parsed and nothing is selectively deleted; the data simply has no route into the new file. The [msm_tool slug="exif-stripper"] does this entirely in your browser, which is the whole point — uploading a photograph to a service to remove its location would hand over the location.
What else leaves with it
Three consequences worth knowing before you use it on anything you care about.
- The output is always a JPEG. Whatever you put in, a JPEG comes out. A PNG loses its transparency — a transparent background becomes black — so this belongs on photographs, not on graphics or screenshots.
- The colour profile goes too. An embedded ICC profile is metadata as far as a canvas is concerned. A photograph in a wide-gamut profile may come back looking slightly duller, because it is now read as ordinary sRGB.
- The image is re-compressed, not copied. On a photograph the difference is very hard to see. On a screenshot, a logo, or anything with flat colour and sharp edges, JPEG is the wrong format and the edges will soften.
Orientation is applied rather than preserved
Many phones store a photograph sideways along with a tag saying which way up it should be. That tag is metadata and goes with the rest — but the browser applies it while drawing, so the image comes out the right way round with nothing left to rotate it again.
The practical effect is that a stripped photograph looks correct in software that ignores orientation tags, which is a small bonus rather than a problem.
What stripping does not do
It removes metadata. It does not remove information visible in the picture.
A street sign, a house number, a reflection in a window, a name badge, a school uniform, the view from a window — all of that survives untouched, and any of it can identify a location as effectively as coordinates. If a photograph needs to be anonymous, look at the image as well as the file.
The same applies in reverse: pixelating a face does not remove the GPS coordinates. The two jobs are separate and both are usually needed.
When to strip
- Anything you publish yourself — a blog, a portfolio, a listing, a marketplace. You control the upload, so nothing else will strip it for you.
- Photographs sent by email or file link. These are almost never processed.
- Photographs of your home, workplace or children. The obvious case, and the one people think of too late.
- Images going to a client or a print shop, where camera settings and editing history are simply not their business.
When to keep it
Metadata is not inherently bad. Photographers rely on it to learn from their own settings, archives depend on capture dates for ordering, and a stock library will want camera information.
Strip a copy for publication and keep the original with everything intact. Once it is gone it cannot be recovered, and the date a photograph was taken is a surprisingly easy thing to lose permanently.