JPG Metadata Remover

A JPG file is a row of labelled segments, and the picture is only some of them. The rest carry the camera and phone details, the GPS position, a thumbnail, editor notes and sometimes a second image or a video tacked on at the end. A JPG metadata remover walks that row, copies the segments the picture needs and leaves out the others, without ever decoding the picture. Add your JPG or JPEG files above and download copies that look identical and say nothing about where or how they were taken. Everything runs in your browser.

How a JPEG file is built

Every segment starts with a two-byte marker and, for most of them, a length. The markers that begin with APP are application segments, a place where any program may store data. That is where almost all JPEG metadata lives.

Because only the labelled segments around the picture are touched, the compressed image data passes through unchanged. That is why a cleaned JPG has exactly the same pixels as the original, which we check by decoding both and comparing, and why it can never come out larger.

What phones and cameras put around the picture

• EXIF and GPS. Make, model, lens, exposure, the exact time, and on most phones the position, altitude and the direction the camera faced.
• A thumbnail inside the EXIF block. Some editors do not update it when you crop, so it can still show the original framing.
• Motion photos. Android phones can append a short MP4 after the still image, with XMP that describes it. A cleaned file keeps the still and drops the video, so what you share is a plain photograph.
• HDR gain maps. Android’s Ultra HDR format stores a second, small image after the main one, plus a directory and XMP that tell a viewer how to use it. Cleaning removes all three, so the photo displays as an ordinary standard-range picture.
• Content Credentials. Some cameras and AI tools sign JPEGs with a C2PA manifest in APP11 segments.
• Comments and IPTC. Editors and photo libraries add captions, credits, contact details and notes.

Rotation, colour and quality

Phones usually save a portrait photo sideways and store a rotation flag in the EXIF block. If every EXIF byte were deleted, the picture would come out turned. So when a photo has such a flag, the clean file gets a tiny replacement EXIF block that holds only the rotation, and the picture stays upright without being re-encoded. The colour profile is kept as well.

Re-saving is where JPEG quality is lost. Opening a file in an editor and saving it again re-compresses every block. Cleaning by cutting segments does not, so you can clean the same file as often as you like without any generation loss.

What we tested

These checks were run on JPEG files made with real encoders and metadata writers, comparing decoded pixels before and after:

• A baseline JPEG with EXIF, GPS, camera make, model and serial fields, an IPTC block, a comment, an XMP packet, a C2PA segment and a trailer: everything identifying gone, pixels identical, output smaller.
• A file with a gain-map image and an MPF directory after the main picture: the main picture’s pixels identical, the second image gone.
• A file with an MP4 appended after the picture: the video gone, the still identical.
• A file with an ICC profile and an EXIF thumbnail: profile kept, thumbnail gone, pixels identical.
• A photo with an orientation flag: rotation kept in a minimal block, everything else removed, compressed data untouched.
• A constructed file with two scans separated by another marker, the pattern progressive JPEGs follow: both scans kept, trailing data dropped.

We have not run it against every camera’s files. If a file looks wrong after cleaning, tell us through the contact page and keep the original.

Clean JPG files in four steps

1. Drop the files anywhere on the page, choose them, or paste from the clipboard.
2. Press Clean. The list shows what each file held, with location, device and AI fields highlighted.
3. Read the result. A second scan checks the output, and a file is marked verified clean only when nothing identifying is left.
4. Download one by one or as a .zip, and rename the copies if their names carry places or dates.

Guests can clean 1 file at a time, up to 25 MB each and 50 files a day. A free account allows 5 at a time, 25 MB each and 500 a day, and Starter, Pro and Business have no daily limit. HEIC files, the default format on many iPhones, are not supported: share them as JPEG, or choose Most Compatible in the camera settings, and clean the JPEG.

Other ways to remove JPEG metadata

To check any result yourself, run exiftool -a -G1 -s photo-clean.jpg. A clean file lists only structure such as image size and colour space. Our EXIF viewer shows the same in your browser, and the image metadata remover covers PNG, WebP and AVIF as well.

Frequently asked questions