Remove EXIF data and GPS from photos — losslessly

Copied, not saved again

One way to remove metadata is to open the picture and save it again. For a JPEG that means compressing it a second time, and the picture changes. The darkroom does not do that. It walks the file, copies every part that belongs to the picture exactly as it is, and leaves out the parts that are metadata.

After writing, the page reads its own output again with the same walker, compares the image data with the original’s byte for byte, and says how many things are still in the file — so you see the result rather than take it on trust.

Orientation: three honest choices

A camera can store the picture sideways and write an Orientation tag that says how to turn it. Remove that tag from such a file and the photo lies on its side. So:

1. Keep the Orientation tag, and only that (the default). The output gets a new EXIF block of 26 bytes holding that one tag. Still lossless.
2. Remove it too. Nothing of EXIF remains. A rotated photo will show on its side.
3. Re-encode upright. The picture is decoded, turned, and compressed again at quality 92. No Orientation tag is needed afterwards — but this is not lossless, the colours are converted to sRGB and the ICC profile is not carried over.

Strip GPS from a photo and keep the rest

“Only the location” leaves the camera, the date and the exposure in place and takes out the position. The pointer to the GPS directory is removed from EXIF, and every byte of that directory and of its values is overwritten with zeros, so the coordinates are gone from the file and not merely unlinked. The EXIF block keeps its length, so nothing else in it moves. If the file also has an XMP packet that mentions GPS, the whole packet is removed; so is a PNG’s hex-encoded EXIF profile that holds GPS.

What this mode does not touch: the maker note, which this page cannot read; the embedded thumbnail; and place names someone typed into a caption or an IPTC field, which are words, not coordinates. The read-back under each result lists what is still there. If that matters, remove everything.

A batch in, a ZIP out

Add as many photos as you like and press Strip all. Each result can be downloaded by itself, or all of them as one ZIP. The ZIP is written by this page too — stored, not compressed, with a CRC-32 for every file — so the batch never leaves your device either. Stripped files end in -clean, location-only ones in -nogps and re-encoded ones in -upright.

Limits

HEIC and AVIF are read but not rewritten: to get a clean copy, convert the picture in a browser that can decode it. A JPEG whose structure cannot be followed from its first marker to its picture data is refused rather than guessed at. Animated PNG and WebP keep their frames. Stripping removes notes about the picture; it cannot remove what the picture shows.

How to check that nothing is uploaded. The page’s own scripts make one request of their own — the sample card, from this site, when you press for it — and none that carries a file. The folder is served with a Content-Security-Policy header that lets the page connect only to this site and to Google’s analytics hosts, so even a mistake here could not send a photo anywhere else: the browser would refuse it. Open the developer tools, choose the Network tab, clear it, then add a photo and run the tool, and watch. Google’s analytics counts the visit and that a tool was used; nothing in this page hands it a file name, a pixel or a tag.