Drop in a photo to see the hidden data your camera or phone tucked inside it, including the GPS location where it was taken. Then download a cleaned copy with that metadata removed, ready to share safely.
Most photos taken on a phone or a modern camera carry a hidden block of data called EXIF, short for Exchangeable Image File Format. It rides along inside the file, invisible when you look at the picture, yet readable by anyone who opens the file with the right tool. This page hand reads that block straight from the bytes of your file and shows you what is in it, with the privacy sensitive parts called out first.
Many cameras write the exact GPS coordinates where a photo was taken into the metadata. That single field can quietly reveal your home address, your workplace, or where your children spend their day. When you post a photo with this data intact, you may be sharing far more than the picture. If your photo contains GPS coordinates, this tool shows them as plain text and flags them with a clear warning. We never plot them on a map and never make a network request to look them up, because that would defeat the privacy promise of the page.
Beyond location, the metadata commonly names the camera or phone make and model, the lens, and the editing software that last touched the file. It also records the original date and time the shutter fired through the DateTimeOriginal field, and an orientation flag that tells viewers which way is up. None of this is as sensitive as location, but together it builds a surprisingly detailed picture of who took a photo, when, and with what.
To remove the metadata, the tool draws your photo onto an HTML canvas and exports that canvas as a fresh image file. A canvas holds only pixels, so the EXIF block, the GPS coordinates, and the other embedded fields are simply not carried into the new file. Before drawing, it reads the EXIF Orientation flag and rotates the pixels to match, so a cleaned photo is never sideways or upside down once the orientation tag is gone.
There is an honest trade off worth stating plainly. Re encoding through a canvas compresses the pixels again, so a cleaned JPEG can be very slightly softer than the original, and the export drops the ICC color profile, which can nudge colors on wide gamut screens. For sharing online the change is usually invisible, but if you need a pixel perfect master, keep the original in a safe place and share only the cleaned copy.
Photos are personal. The whole reason to check a photo for a hidden home address is that you do not want it leaking, so it would make no sense to upload that photo to a stranger's server to find out. Every step here, reading the bytes, decoding the EXIF, and re encoding the cleaned image, happens with JavaScript on this page. Your photo is never uploaded, logged, or stored. You can run a private family photo through it without the file ever leaving your machine. The same client side principle runs through the rest of the free tools, built by a team that works on web application security.