Photo Privacy Cleaner

Most “metadata removers” edit the file in place, deleting tags one by one — and any tag the developer forgot to handle survives. This cleaner takes the stronger approach: it throws the original file's structure away entirely. Your browser decodes the photo into pixels, paints those pixels onto a fresh canvas, and encodes a brand-new file from the canvas. A canvas has nowhere to put EXIF, XMP, IPTC or C2PA data, so none of it can leak into the output — GPS coordinates, camera and lens details, software names, timestamps, author fields, edit history and embedded preview thumbnails are all simply absent from the new file.

That is also why the verification step matters. After rebuilding, the tool feeds the new file's bytes back into the same metadata scanner that powers the AI Label Checker — the scanner that looks for C2PA manifests, IPTC fields, EXIF GPS and the rest — and displays the two reports next to each other. If the scanner finds nothing in the cleaned file, you are not being asked to trust a promise; you are looking at the same evidence a platform or a stranger would find.

A parent photographs their child in the garden and posts it to a school parents' group. The photo looks harmless — but the file's EXIF block carries the phone model, the exact date and time, and GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres of the family home. Anyone who saves the image can read all of it with free tools. Run through this cleaner first, the before report lists the GPS block, the device fields and the timestamps; the after report is empty, and the picture itself is unchanged. Multiply that by the everyday cases — marketplace listings photographed at home, a “for sale” car shot on your own driveway, a workplace photo with a location-tagged whiteboard — and the habit of cleaning before sharing stops a whole category of accidental disclosure.

One thing the cleaner deliberately does not touch: anything burned into the pixels themselves. A house number visible in the photo, a reflection in a window, or an invisible AI watermark such as SynthID all live in the image, not the metadata, and no metadata tool can remove them. For visible sensitive details, cover them first with the Screenshot Redactor or Face Blur, then clean the result here.

ExifTool's own documentation warns that metadata is a maze of overlapping standards — MakerNotes, proprietary chunks, XMP sidecars — and cleaner apps routinely miss a container or two. The rebuild approach sidesteps the maze instead of navigating it: there is no list of tags to forget, because nothing is copied. And because the proof is a re-scan of the actual output bytes — the exact operation in the worked example above, performed on your file, on your device — the before/after panel is evidence, not marketing. If a future format hides data somewhere our scanner cannot read, the honest consequence appears right there in the after column rather than being hidden from you.

The rebuild keeps pixels only, so colour profiles are not carried across: the output is rendered in standard sRGB, and photos shot in wide-gamut modes may shift colour very slightly. Animated images become a still of their first frame. Orientation is applied permanently (your browser honours the EXIF rotation when loading, so the cleaned photo opens the right way up everywhere — usually a benefit). Everything is removed, including your own copyright and credit fields, so keep the original as your archive copy. Very large photos are limited by your device's memory, and photos are the whole scope: videos are not supported, by design and stated openly above.