A photo out of a phone carries more than the picture. The EXIF block usually holds the date and time to the second, the phone or camera model, the lens and exposure settings, and — if location services were on — the coordinates of the spot you were standing in. Some cameras add a serial number; some editing apps quietly add your name.
The part most EXIF removers get wrong
Stripping metadata should not touch the picture. Most online tools decode the JPEG, hand the pixels to an encoder and give you the result: a second-generation JPEG, a bit softer, a different size, with fresh compression artifacts layered over the old ones. You asked for the same file without the tags and got a different file.
PIXLFLW puts an Original entry at the top of the export menu. It rewrites the container and copies the compressed image data across untouched — the same scan, bit for bit, with the metadata segments cut out. The download is lighter by exactly what the tags weighed and identical in every other byte. JPG, PNG and WEBP all work this way.
What goes, and what stays
- Removed — EXIF (date, camera, lens, GPS), XMP, IPTC captions and credits, and any comment block. In a PNG that covers the text chunks as well; in a WEBP, the EXIF and XMP chunks.
- Kept — the colour profile. An ICC profile says nothing about you; it tells a screen what the file's colours mean. Drop it and the photo shifts.
- Kept by default — one orientation tag, for the reason below.
Why the rotation tag survives by default
Phones don't turn the picture when you turn the phone. They save it as the sensor read it and write a single EXIF field saying which way is up. Remove all metadata and that field goes with it — then a portrait shot lies on its side in whatever software reads the file next.
So the default here keeps that one field and nothing around it: a rebuilt block holding the orientation and no date, no coordinates, no camera. If you want nothing at all left, switch to Remove everything. If you want the rotation to stop depending on a tag, bake it into the pixels instead — that re-encodes the photo, which is the trade.
HEIC and AVIF
Neither can be cleaned without being decoded first. Export them as JPG, PNG or WEBP instead: re-encoding drops every tag as a side effect, because the editor draws to a canvas and a canvas holds pixels and nothing else. The image is re-compressed in the process. That is stated here rather than left for you to discover.
Nothing is uploaded
The file is read and rewritten in your browser. It never reaches a server — which matters more on this page than on any other here, since the whole point is that the coordinates in that photo stay yours. It is checkable: open the network tab in your browser's developer tools and drop a photo in.
How to remove EXIF data
- Drop the photo into the upload area above. The editor opens and the source panel lists the tags it found — that is what is in your file right now.
- The export format is already set to Original and metadata removal is already on.
- Save. Same picture, fewer kilobytes, nothing about you left in it.
Other formats go in too: GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, WEBP, HEIC, TIFF.