Free EXIF & GPS Remover — Strip Photo Metadata

Why your photos leak more than you think

Every JPG you take with a phone or camera carries an invisible payload of EXIF metadata — GPS coordinates accurate to a few meters, the precise timestamp the photo was taken (down to the second), the camera's serial number, the lens used, and a fingerprint of every editing app that touched the file. Post that JPG to Reddit, Craigslist, eBay, a property listing, a dating profile, or a forum, and anyone who downloads it can read all of it with a free EXIF viewer. SimpleTool's stripper re-encodes the image through a fresh canvas in your browser, which drops every embedded tag — pixels are preserved, metadata isn't. Your photos never touch a server.

Why “just upload to an EXIF remover site” is the wrong answer

Most online EXIF strippers upload your files to their server, strip the tags there, and send the cleaned JPGs back. That means a third party now has copies of the original photos plus the GPS coordinates and timestamps you were trying to hide. Many of those services explicitly reserve the right to log, scan, or retain uploads. SimpleTool runs the entire decode-and-re-encode pipeline directly in your browser tab. Once you close the tab, nothing remains. Nothing is logged, retained, or sent anywhere.

What actually gets stripped

Decoding through a fresh canvas re-encode drops the entire EXIF/IPTC/XMP block, including:

• GPS coordinates — precise location where the photo was taken
• Capture timestamp — exact date, time, and time zone
• Camera make, model, serial number — device fingerprint
• Lens model, focal length, aperture, ISO, shutter speed
• Software fingerprint — phone OS, edit history, retouching apps
• Author / copyright tags — your name if your camera embeds it
• Thumbnail with original metadata — many EXIF viewers fall back to a thumbnail copy

Image orientation is read first and baked into the output pixels, so photos don't come out sideways after the strip.

When to use this vs. the HEIC to JPG converter

Use this tool for photos that are already in JPG, PNG, or WebP — screenshots, photos shared from Android, anything you exported from a desktop editor. If your photos are still in iPhone HEIC format, use the HEIC to JPG converter — it handles the libheif decode and the EXIF strip in a single pass, so you don't need to convert first and clean second.

EXIF Removers Compared: SimpleTool vs ExifTool vs Online Strippers vs Phone Camera Apps

Four routes to clean metadata. Different setup, different privacy posture.

ExifTool is the gold standard for power-users and scripts — universally trusted, handles every weird metadata format, runs on the CLI. For non-developer users without command-line comfort, SimpleTool delivers the same end result (a clean image with all metadata stripped) without the install and learning curve. Phone “location off” settings prevent GPS for new photos but don't clean photos you already have.

Output format options