Your Photos Know Where You Live: Stripping EXIF and GPS Metadata

Every photo from a phone camera carries invisible passengers: GPS coordinates, device model, timestamps, sometimes the owner's name and a thumbnail of a pre-crop version. Post the photo as-is and you've published your home address alongside it. The EXIF & Metadata Stripper removes all of it — locally, with a report of exactly what left.

What's actually inside

JPEG files carry an EXIF APP1 segment: camera settings, orientation, the full GPS block (latitude/longitude/altitude), software trails from every editor that touched the file, and IPTC/Photoshop markers added by newsroom and studio tools.

PNG files are cleaner but not innocent: tEXt, zTXt and iTXt chunks hold titles, author names and tool credits, and the newer eXIf chunk embeds the same EXIF data JPEGs carry.

How the stripping works

For JPEG the tool removes the entire EXIF segment with piexifjs after reading out the field list for your report. For PNG it walks the chunk structure byte by byte — every chunk is a length/type/data/CRC record — and drops only the four metadata chunk types, copying everything else (your actual pixels, the palette, transparency) untouched. The result is a new file; the original on disk is never modified.

Reading the report

Every removed field is listed: GPS.Latitude, 0th.Make, PNG tEXt: Comment — with byte sizes for segment-level entries. A zero-entry report means the file was already clean (screenshots often are), which is confirmation, not failure.

Good habits

• Strip before uploading to social platforms — their stripping is inconsistent and slow, and some keep the original.
• Strip client work before delivery; editing history and internal ratings shouldn't ship.
• Remember metadata removal ≠ anonymization of the image itself: faces, house numbers and reflections are still in the pixels.

Before publishing, the Image Watermarker can stamp attribution; if the photo contains text you want to reuse, the OCR extractor pulls it out — all without uploads.