Image Metadata Editor

A photo is the picture plus several blocks of data about it. Viewers rarely show them, but they travel with the file to anyone you send it to: by email, in a chat app's "send as file" mode, on a cloud-drive link, or on a website that serves uploads as they are.

EXIF stores latitude and longitude as degrees, minutes and seconds, each a fraction, plus a letter for the hemisphere. A file might hold 51/1, 30/1, 2646/100 with N and 0/1, 7/1, 3990/100 with W. Turned into decimal degrees:

51 + 30/60 + 26.46/3600 = 51.507350
 0 +  7/60 + 39.90/3600 =  0.127750 → west, so −0.127750

That is a spot just off Trafalgar Square in central London. Phone GPS is typically accurate to about 5 m under open sky, so a position like this is enough to pick out a single house. The viewer above links any position it finds to OpenStreetMap so you can see what someone else would see.

One degree of latitude is about 111 km everywhere; a degree of longitude shrinks towards the poles (about 69 km at London's latitude), so east–west precision is a little finer than the table shows.

Many metadata removers draw the photo onto a canvas and save a new file. That does drop the metadata, but it also recompresses a JPEG (a little quality is lost every time), usually throws away the colour profile, and can turn a 16-bit PNG into an 8-bit one.

This tool works on the file structure instead. A JPEG is a series of segments, a PNG a series of chunks, a WebP a series of RIFF chunks; the metadata sits in its own segments or chunks, apart from the compressed picture. The editor copies the picture data across byte for byte and only rewrites the metadata blocks, then reads the new file back to confirm what is left. That is why removing everything from a 3 MB phone photo usually saves only a few kilobytes, plus whatever the thumbnail and any HDR or motion data took up.

When editing EXIF fields, the changed directory is written at the end of the EXIF block and the old one is cleared, so the camera's maker note (which often points at fixed positions in the block) keeps working.

Phones and cameras usually save the picture the way the sensor saw it and add an EXIF Orientation tag, for example "rotate 90° clockwise", instead of turning the pixels. Browsers and photo apps read the tag and show the photo upright. Remove all EXIF and the tag goes too, so a portrait photo appears on its side.

With "Keep the orientation tag" ticked, Remove everything writes a new EXIF block holding only that one tag, and only when the photo needs it. It says nothing about you or the camera.

EXIF's DateTimeOriginal is a local clock reading such as 2026:06:01 14:30:05, with no time zone. Version 2.31 of the Exif standard added OffsetTimeOriginal (for example +01:00) so software can place the photo on a single timeline. Many cameras still leave it out, and a camera that was never moved off its home time zone records the wrong hour after a flight.

Example: a camera set to London time (UTC+1 in summer) takes a photo in New York at 2:30 pm local time. The file says 19:30:05. Set Date taken to 14:30:05 and the offset to UTC−04:00, and photo libraries that read the offset will sort it correctly next to phone photos from the same trip. The editor writes the date to EXIF (taken and digitized) and to XMP (exif:DateTimeOriginal, xmp:CreateDate and photoshop:DateCreated), so the date matches whichever one an app reads.

Windows File Explorer, Adobe Lightroom and Bridge, and many photo libraries read the XMP properties; EXIF fields cover software that only reads EXIF. Text is written as UTF-8, so accented names and symbols such as © are kept. Keywords live only in XMP because EXIF has no standard keyword tag.

• What the picture shows. A street sign, a house number, a school uniform or a reflection can give away a place just as well as GPS. Crop or blur those separately.
• HEIC, AVIF, RAW, TIFF and GIF. Only JPEG, PNG and WebP are supported. iPhones save HEIC by default but often send JPEG when sharing; you can also choose Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible.
• IPTC in Edit and Remove location. The IPTC block is kept as it is in those modes; Remove everything deletes it.
• Data after the image in Edit and Remove location. HDR gain maps and motion-photo videos are kept (their position index is updated so they still work); Remove everything drops them, and the photo then shows without HDR.
• Very long text. A JPEG metadata segment holds at most 64 KB, so a block of text longer than that is refused rather than cut short.