# Remove EXIF > Remove location, EXIF and GPS from HEIC (iPhone), JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF photos. Pixels are never re-encoded; content credentials stay unless you clear them. - URL: https://bytescope.dev/en/remove-exif/ - Locale: en · Also: [ja](https://bytescope.dev/ja/remove-exif.md) · [zh-Hant](https://bytescope.dev/zh-Hant/remove-exif.md) - Runs: Your files never leave your browser — all processing is local. - Requires: Any modern browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari), desktop and mobile. - Updated: 2026-09-08 ## What it does Lossless here has a precise, checkable meaning, so start with what happens to the bytes. A JPEG is a chain of marker segments, and the metadata sits in segments of its own: `APP1` carries EXIF — camera, timestamps, GPS — `APP13` carries the IPTC and Photoshop blocks, `APP2` can carry an ICC profile. Cleaning the file means walking that chain, dropping the segments that hold metadata, and copying the compressed scan data straight through. The entropy-coded image data is never decoded, requantised or re-encoded; it is copied byte for byte, so the pixels that come out are bit-identical to the pixels that went in. Not visually identical. Identical. Almost every other metadata remover works the other way round: it decodes your JPEG, loses the metadata by virtue of having discarded the whole file, and encodes a new one. That does clean the photo, and it costs you a generation of quality every time — fresh quantisation on top of the old, blocking around edges that were already soft, and often a bigger file than you started with. Strip metadata twice and you pay twice. PNG gets the same byte-level treatment: a PNG is a chain of chunks, so `tEXt`, `iTXt`, `zTXt` and `eXIf` are dropped while the `IDAT` image data is copied untouched. Nothing is recompressed, in either format. Drop in a whole folder of photos and they are cleaned in one pass, downloadable individually or all at once. Each file comes with a before/after metadata comparison — which tags were found, which were removed, what is left — because 'metadata removed' as a bare claim is not something you can check, and being checkable is the entire point of this page. Re-open a cleaned file in the EXIF viewer if you want a second opinion from a different code path. All of it runs in your browser: a tool that offered to protect your photos' privacy by uploading them to a server first would be a strange thing to trust. iPhone photos are HEIC, and WebP and AVIF are everywhere on the web, so those are handled too — with a different technique, because they cannot be cut the way a JPEG can. A HEIC or AVIF file keeps its EXIF and XMP as items, and a table elsewhere in the file records the exact byte position of every item, the picture included. Delete an item and every position after it is wrong, so the tool does not delete anything: it overwrites the metadata items where they sit and leaves the structure alone. The file ends up exactly the same size, with the metadata replaced by an empty, valid stand-in, and the image data is byte-identical. WebP is cut like a PNG, one chunk at a time. If you only want the location gone, a location-only mode keeps the capture time and camera model and clears just the GPS. And a Live Photo is two files — the HEIC still and a short `.MOV` — with coordinates in both, so clean the video too with the video location remover. The reason this matters is dull and specific. A photo taken in your living room and posted publicly usually contains the coordinates of your living room to within a few metres, plus the time it was taken and the phone that took it. Sell something on a marketplace with a shot taken at home, post your dog in a hobby group, send a holiday picture to a forum — the address travels along in fields nobody reads until somebody does. Big platforms recompress uploads and strip metadata as a side effect, but direct file transfers do not: email attachments, cloud links, Discord and Telegram file sends, anything handed over as a file. Clean it once, before it leaves. ## Limits Does not remove metadata from PDF, video or Office files (use remove-video-location for MP4/MOV), does not support TIFF, GIF or RAW, and does not alter the pixels. HEIC and AVIF are overwritten in place, so the file size stays the same; content credentials (C2PA) are kept unless you choose to clear them. ## FAQ ### Does removing EXIF reduce image quality? No, and it is worth being concrete about why. Metadata and pixels live in different parts of the file. In a JPEG the pixels are the entropy-coded scan data; in a PNG they are the `IDAT` chunks. This tool never hands either of those to a decoder — it copies them to the output unchanged and simply omits the metadata segments around them. Nothing is decompressed, so nothing is recompressed, so there is no quality generation to lose. The output is a few kilobytes smaller, or a few hundred if an embedded thumbnail went with the EXIF, and every pixel is bit-for-bit what it was. If you want to prove it, compare the two files in the binary diff tool: the only bytes that moved are the ones that described the photo rather than being the photo. ### What exactly is removed, and what is kept? Removed: EXIF in `APP1` (camera, lens, exposure, `DateTimeOriginal`, GPS, camera serial), the IPTC and Photoshop blocks in `APP13`, XMP, JPEG comment segments, and any thumbnail embedded alongside the EXIF; in PNG, the `tEXt`, `iTXt`, `zTXt`, `tIME` and `eXIf` chunks. Kept by default: the ICC colour profile — `APP2` in JPEG, `iCCP` and the colour chunks in PNG. That last one is a judgement call, and the reasoning is that an ICC profile says nothing about you, your camera or where you stood, while removing it changes how the photo looks: a Display P3 image rendered as sRGB comes out visibly duller. A privacy tool should not quietly shift your colours. If you want the profile gone as well, there is a switch for it. The same applies to the other formats: in WebP the `EXIF` and `XMP ` chunks go, and in HEIC and AVIF the EXIF and XMP items are overwritten. Content credentials (C2PA) are the exception to "everything goes": they are kept by default and only cleared if you tick that option, because clearing them is a decision about provenance, not just privacy. ### Will the photo end up rotated after the metadata is gone? This is the one real trap, so the tool takes a side. Phones usually store the frame in the sensor's native orientation and add an EXIF `Orientation` tag meaning 'rotate this when displaying'. Strip that tag with everything else and the pixels are still untouched, but any viewer that was relying on the tag now shows the photo sideways. Rotating the pixels for real would fix it and would also mean re-encoding, which is the one thing this page exists not to do. So the default output keeps exactly one tag: a minimal `APP1` block containing `Orientation` and nothing else — no camera, no timestamp, no GPS — which is all a viewer needs to draw the photo the right way up. Strict mode drops even that for a file with zero metadata; use it when you want absolutely nothing left, and expect some viewers to show the photo rotated. The comparison table tells you which case a given file is in, since a photo whose `Orientation` is already 1 loses nothing either way. WebP and HEIC behave a little differently. A WebP keeps its orientation in the EXIF chunk that is removed, so the rotation marker is not preserved there and the comparison table warns you when it matters. A HEIC keeps its rotation in the image properties rather than in EXIF, so it is never affected and stays upright. ### Which formats can be cleaned losslessly? JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC/HEIF and AVIF. That covers `.jpg` and `.jpeg` off a camera, `.heic` straight from an iPhone, `.webp` and `.avif` from the web, and PNG screenshots and tool exports. TIFF, GIF and RAW files are not supported. None of this converts anything: converting HEIC to JPEG would re-encode the picture, so the tool edits the file you gave it and nothing else. Your browser may not be able to show a HEIC preview at all. That does not matter, because the cleaning never decodes the image — if the preview is blank, the file was still read and cleaned. ### Why is the cleaned HEIC exactly the same size, and why can I see zeros in a hex editor? Because HEIC and AVIF are cleaned in place, by design. These files keep a table of the exact byte position of every item inside them, the photo included, so removing metadata by deleting bytes would shift everything after it and risk a broken file. Overwriting is safe: the EXIF and XMP items are replaced with an empty but valid stand-in of the same length, the padding is zeros, and nothing else moves. If you open the result in a hex editor and see a run of zeros where the metadata used to be, that is the cleaning, not a leftover. Read it back in the EXIF viewer to confirm there is nothing left to read. ### What does the location-only mode keep? It clears the GPS block and leaves the rest of the EXIF alone, so the capture time, camera and lens, and orientation survive. That suits the common case of wanting to post a photo without saying where it was taken. Two limits apply. XMP is still removed in this mode, because location fields can be duplicated there and editing XMP in place is risky. And it only handles GPS: a caption that names a place, or a recognisable street in the picture itself, is not metadata and is not touched. ### What are content credentials (C2PA), and why are they kept by default? Content credentials are a signed record of how a file was made or edited, embedded in the file by some cameras and AI and editing tools. They are not tracking data about you in the way GPS is, and once removed the file can no longer prove where it came from. So this page keeps them unless you tick the option to clear them, and the report lists them on a row of their own. Tick it if the credentials themselves reveal something you would rather not share, such as the name of an account or an editing tool. ### Does a Live Photo have location in its video as well? Yes. A Live Photo is a HEIC still plus a short `.MOV`, and both can carry coordinates, so cleaning only the photo leaves the location in the video. Drop the `.MOV` into the Remove Video Location tool as well. For the HEIC, location-only mode is the gentler choice, since it leaves the rest of the EXIF intact instead of discarding everything. ### Are my photos uploaded anywhere? No. Every file is opened locally with the File API, the segment and chunk surgery runs in JavaScript in your own tab, and the cleaned file is handed back as a download your browser generated. This page is a static file with no API behind it, so there is nowhere to upload to even in principle, and it keeps working with the network switched off. For this particular tool that is not a detail: the photos you most want to strip GPS from are the photos you least want to send to an unknown server, and an upload-based cleaner has already had the coordinates you were trying to remove. ## Related tools - [EXIF Viewer](https://bytescope.dev/en/exif-viewer.md) — Read every EXIF tag first, or re-open a cleaned file to check it. - [Binary Diff](https://bytescope.dev/en/binary-diff.md) — Compare the original and cleaned files byte by byte. - [Image Format Converter](https://bytescope.dev/en/image-convert.md) — Need a format change too? Convert here, then clean the result. - [Remove Video Location](https://bytescope.dev/en/remove-video-location.md) — Live Photos and phone videos carry a location too. Clear it without re-encoding.