How to remove EXIF and metadata from a photo

1 What a photo carries

• EXIF: the location, the date and time with the time zone, the camera and lens, their serial numbers, the owner's name and the software.
• XMP: Adobe's block, which often repeats the location and the dates, and keeps a history of the edits.
• IPTC: the caption, keywords, credits and the place in words.
• The maker's notes: more serial numbers, and on an iPhone the IDs that tie a photo to its Live Photo and the rest of its burst.
• A thumbnail: a small copy of the picture, which an editor that crops the photo may leave uncropped.
• Content Credentials and AI prompts: who or what made the picture, and the prompt it was made from.

Every field, with its value and where it lies in the file: EXIF viewer: what a photo's metadata says.

2 Remove it from one photo

Open the photo in hexscope. It reads JPEG, an iPhone's HEIC, PNG, WebP, AVIF and TIFF. Under What this photo reveals, press Remove it — save a clean copy. In the copy:

• the location, the camera and lens, the serial numbers, the owner, the dates and the software are gone, and for a JPEG its thumbnail and comments too;
• the picture is copied byte for byte: nothing is recompressed, so nothing loses quality;
• a photo taken sideways keeps its orientation, so it still shows the right way up.

Then press Open the clean copy: hexscope reads the copy back and marks each finding it has checked as removed.

3 Many photos at once

Choose several photos, or drop a folder on the page: each is listed with what it gives away, and Save clean copies saves them all as one ZIP. On a phone, hexscope offers to share the copies instead, so you can save them to your photos or send them straight on.

4 Other ways, and what they leave

• iPhone: when you share a photo, tap Options at the top and turn off Location. That takes out the location only; the camera and the time stay.
• Mac: in Preview, Tools → Show Inspector, then the location tab and Remove Location Info. Again, the location only.
• Windows: right-click a JPEG, Properties → Details → Remove Properties and Personal Information. It works for JPEG files.
• Exporting from an editor drops some of it, but recompresses the picture, and many editors keep the metadata unless told not to.
• A screenshot of the photo carries none of the camera's data, but loses detail and adds facts of its own: see What a screenshot gives away.

Whichever way you use, check the result: open the photo you are about to send in hexscope and see what is left.

5 On your own computer

The command line tool cleans a whole folder of photos and reads every copy back to confirm what was removed:

hexscope clean --verify --out clean/ photos/

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