PNG Metadata Remover

A PNG rarely carries a GPS position, but it can carry a great deal of text. PNG files are built from chunks, and any program can add a text chunk: the software that made the file, a comment, a creation time, an XMP packet, or the full prompt and settings of an AI image. A PNG metadata remover deletes those chunks and everything else that is not needed to draw the picture. Add your PNG files above and download copies with identical pixels, transparency and colour. Nothing is uploaded.

What is inside a PNG file

After an eight-byte signature, a PNG is a list of chunks, each with a four-letter name, a length and a checksum. Four are critical because the picture cannot be drawn without them. Everything else is ancillary, which means a decoder can ignore it and still show the image.

The tool works from a list of chunks to keep rather than a list to delete. A chunk it does not recognise, for example a private one written by an editor, is dropped, so a new kind of metadata cannot slip through. The cost is that a rare rendering-neutral chunk such as an image offset is dropped too, which does not change how the picture looks.

The text keywords you will meet

Text chunks have a keyword and a value. The PNG standard defines a few keywords, and tools invent many more.

• Standard keywords: Title, Author, Description, Copyright, Creation Time, Software, Disclaimer, Warning, Source and Comment.
• `XML:com.adobe.xmp`: an XMP packet, which can name the creator tool, the author, the edit history and an AI source label.
• `parameters`: the prompt and settings written by Stable Diffusion interfaces such as AUTOMATIC1111.
• `prompt` and `workflow`: the graphs ComfyUI stores so an image can be rebuilt.

All of them are removed, whatever the keyword. The report names the ones it recognises, for example “Generation parameters (prompt, seed, model)” or “ComfyUI workflow”, and lists any other text chunk as “PNG text” with its keyword so you can see what was there. The AI image metadata remover explains what each AI tool writes.

Screenshots, exports and design files

A PNG made by a screenshot tool, a design program or an export pipeline usually has no GPS, but it often has a Software line, a creation time and a colour profile, and files saved from image editors may carry an XMP packet with the document’s history. Those are small leaks, such as the name of the program, the date, and sometimes a project or author name. They are worth removing from files you publish, and removing them makes the file a little smaller.

Transparency, 16-bit colour and animation are untouched

The compressed pixel data in the IDAT chunks is never decoded or rewritten, so the colour type and bit depth do not matter. We checked this with PNG files written in seven layouts, each with text, EXIF, XMP and an ICC profile added by ExifTool, and compared decoded pixels before and after.

• RGB and RGBA, with and without transparency.
• Palette images with a PLTE chunk.
• 16-bit RGB and 16-bit grey.
• 8-bit grey, and grey with an alpha channel.
• Animated PNG: every frame identical, animation chunks kept.

In every case the decoded pixels matched the original exactly, the text, EXIF and XMP were gone, and the colour profile, palette and pixel density were still in place.

Metadata is not the only thing a screenshot gives away

Cleaning a screenshot removes the hidden data and nothing that the picture shows. Browser tabs, notification banners, file paths, account names, email addresses, order numbers and the clock in the status bar are all visible to anyone who opens the image. Crop or cover them before you share the file, and then clean it. Doing it in that order matters, because some editors save a fresh copy that adds its own Software line and creation time.

Clean PNG files in four steps

1. Drop the PNG files on the page, or choose them. Pasting a screenshot from the clipboard works too.
2. Press Clean. Each file is processed in your browser, so a large batch does not wait on an upload.
3. Read the report. AI records, Content Credentials, text keywords and trailing data are listed by name, and a second scan confirms nothing is left.
4. Download the clean files, or a .zip of all of them.

Guests clean 1 file at a time, up to 25 MB each and 50 images a day. A free account allows 5 at a time, 25 MB each and 500 a day. Starter, Pro and Business have no daily limit and a bigger batch size. The image metadata remover page covers the same limits for JPG and WebP.

Compared with PNG optimisers

Optimisers such as oxipng and optipng can strip chunks, and they also try to recompress the pixel stream to shrink the file. That recompression is lossless, but it takes time and changes every byte of the picture data. If you only need the metadata gone, cutting the chunks is instant and leaves the pixel stream byte for byte as it was. If you also want the smallest possible file, run an optimiser afterwards.

To see the chunks in a file, pngcheck -v image.png lists each one, and exiftool -a -G1 -s image.png shows the text and EXIF it can find. After cleaning, a PNG typically lists only IHDR, optional colour and palette chunks, IDAT and IEND.

Frequently asked questions