By Shinobi Tools Team · Last updated: July 2026
Every photo carries a hidden diary, and the technical name for it is EXIF data. It records where the photo was taken (GPS), what device took it, when, with which settings, and sometimes who owns the camera. Useful for photographers, risky for anyone posting photos publicly. Here's how to strip it, and what to know before you do.
| Removed | Kept (on purpose) |
|---|---|
| GPS coordinates & altitude | Orientation flag, so the photo doesn't display sideways |
| Camera / phone make & model, lens | Color profile (ICC), so colors stay accurate |
| Date & time taken, camera settings | That's it. Everything else goes. |
| Editing software, author / owner names | |
| Device serial numbers, XMP & IPTC blocks |
The image pixels are never re-encoded, so there is zero quality loss: the cleaned file shows the identical picture, just without the diary.
The single most sensitive field a photo carries is where it was taken. A phone with location access for the camera writes the exact latitude and longitude, usually accurate to a few metres, into every shot. Share that file as-is and whoever receives it can read the spot: your home, your child's school, your workplace. The remover above strips the coordinates along with everything else and shows you the exact position that was embedded before it removes it, so there is nothing separate to do for location, uploading the photo already covers it.
Turn it off at the source too. Cleaning photos you already took is what this page is for; stopping new ones from being tagged is a phone setting. On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → set to Never (or "Ask"). On Android: open the Camera app's own settings and disable the location or geo-tag toggle; menus vary a little per version. Note this only affects new photos, everything already in your camera roll keeps whatever was saved at the time.
You don't have to decide blind. Drop a photo into the remover and it lists the privacy-sensitive fields it found (location, device, timestamps, embedded names) before you download anything; grabbing the cleaned copy is optional. A fresh phone photo commonly carries 20 to 60 tags including location and device details; a screenshot usually shows nothing personal; an image saved from a social network is often already stripped. When a file is already clean the tool says so honestly instead of inventing findings. It highlights the fields that matter for privacy rather than dumping every raw tag, if you need a full EXIF laboratory, a desktop tool like ExifTool lists them all. Two companion guides go deeper than this page does: checking what a photo contains explains which step of the photo's life wrote each field and which of them genuinely identifies you, and removing the GPS location covers why the strip is lossless and what the picture itself still gives away after the coordinates are gone.
Only worried about location? The GPS section above covers it. Want the full background on everything a photo can leak? Read what your photos reveal, or the quick tool chooser if you're after a different job.
Does Instagram/Facebook remove EXIF for me? The big social networks strip most metadata from the copies they display. But the moment you share the original file (e-mail, cloud link, marketplace, messenger set to "send as file"), it travels complete.
Can I check what's in my photo without removing it? Yes. Upload it to the tool and look at the "what it was carrying" list; downloading the clean copy is optional, and the upload is deleted right after processing either way.
Does removing metadata change how the photo looks? No. Only the metadata sections of the file are rewritten; the pixels are not re-encoded, and orientation plus the colour profile are kept, so the picture is identical.
Can I stop my phone saving location in the first place? Yes, it's a camera setting, see the GPS section above for the iPhone and Android steps. It only affects new photos, though; anything already taken keeps what it saved.
Why no TIFF? In TIFF files some camera fields are part of the image structure itself and can't be cleanly removed. Rather than half-clean a file and pretend, the tool tells you no; convert to JPEG or PNG first.