unsigned / remove-exif-from-photo
guide · privacy
How to remove EXIF & GPS data from a photo
Photos quietly store the camera you used, the exact time, and often the GPS coordinates of where you stood. Here is how to strip that out in seconds — without uploading your image anywhere.
What is EXIF data — and why should you care?
EXIF is a block of metadata your camera or phone writes into every photo. It travels inside the image file itself, so it survives being emailed, uploaded to cloud storage, or sent through a messaging app that does not deliberately remove it.
A typical phone photo carries:
- The make and model of the device, and often its serial number.
- The exact date and time the shutter fired, down to the second.
- Exposure settings, lens, and software used to edit it.
- GPS coordinates precise enough to identify a specific building.
Share the file as-is and anyone who receives it can read all of that with a free tool. That is fine for a landscape shot. It is less fine for a photo taken at home, at a client site, or anywhere you would rather not pin on a map.
Does removing EXIF reduce image quality?
Not when it is done properly. Metadata sits in its own segments of the file, separate from the compressed pixel data. Removing those segments leaves the image data byte-for-byte identical — the photo you get back is the same photo, just without the record attached.
The quality loss people run into comes from tools that take a shortcut: they decode the image, draw it onto a canvas and re-encode it. That does strip the metadata, but it also re-compresses a JPEG that was already compressed once. Unsigned only falls back to that route for formats it cannot edit in place, and it tells you on the card when it has.
EXIF is not the only thing hiding in the file
Most “EXIF removers” do exactly what the name says and stop there. But a modern image can carry at least four separate metadata blocks, and stripping one leaves the rest:
- EXIF — camera, timestamp, GPS.
- XMP — Adobe’s metadata block, which often duplicates the GPS and adds editing history.
- IPTC — captions, credits and copyright, common on press images.
- C2PA Content Credentials — a signed record of how the image was made, including whether an AI model generated it.
Unsigned removes all of them in the same pass, then re-reads the result to confirm nothing survived.
How to strip it without uploading your photo
Most online EXIF removers upload your image to their server, strip it there, and send it back. For a privacy task that is an odd trade: to stop strangers reading your location, you first hand the file to a stranger.
Unsigned runs entirely in your browser. Drop the photo, review what it contains, click strip, and download the clean copy. There is no upload step because there is no server involved — you can leave your network tab open and watch it stay quiet.