EXIF Viewer & Stripper

If you have a smartphone and your camera roll's "Location Services" toggle is on, every single photo you've ever taken on that phone is geotagged. The latitude and longitude where you stood when you pressed the shutter sit inside the file, accurate to within a few meters, ready to read by anyone with a copy of the photo. This has been true since the iPhone 3GS in 2009. The privacy implications are real: your home, your workplace, your favorite coffee shop, your child's school, every restaurant you photograph the menu of — all of it is in the file, all of it transmits anywhere you share the photo, unless something along the way strips it.

This tool exists for two related jobs.

**Job 1: see what's in your photos.** The display reads every EXIF tag the `exifr` library can extract and groups them into meaningful sections. Camera shows the make, model, and lens. Exposure shows the aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and focal length — useful for learning from your own shots or someone else's. Time shows when the photo was captured and when the file was created (sometimes different, especially after editing). And GPS — when present — shows latitude and longitude with the precision they were captured at, plus altitude when available. The GPS section is intentionally styled red with a OpenStreetMap link because it's the one piece of metadata most people are surprised to learn is there.

**Job 2: strip the metadata before you share.** Click the button at the bottom and the tool re-encodes the image through the browser's canvas, which is the standard technique for washing all sidecar metadata. The output is a JPG (or PNG, matching the input) with pixels identical to what you uploaded but with no EXIF, no IPTC, no XMP, no thumbnail, no ICC profile, no vendor blobs. Drop the result back in to confirm — the display reads "No EXIF metadata found" and you have a file safe to share anywhere.

**What about social-media stripping?** It varies enough to be unreliable. The major Western social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X) generally strip GPS but keep camera info; LinkedIn and Discord strip almost everything; smaller platforms keep everything; direct shares (email, AirDrop, Signal, iMessage) preserve everything; cloud backups preserve everything. If you care about not leaking location data, the only safe assumption is "the file I'm about to share carries my full metadata unless I personally stripped it." This tool gives you that personal stripping step.

A subtle point about **modern phone formats**: iPhones since 2017 default to HEIC (High Efficiency Image Format). HEIC has the same EXIF + GPS structure as JPG and the same privacy issues. The `exifr` library reads HEIC metadata fine; stripping requires converting to JPG first (which the tool does automatically since canvas can decode HEIC on modern browsers). Android phones using HEIF behave the same way.

**RAW formats** are out of scope for stripping. CR2 (Canon), NEF (Nikon), ARW (Sony), DNG, and other RAW formats are read-only for metadata — they exist precisely to preserve every capture parameter for editing flexibility, and re-encoding RAW to JPG loses the very thing that makes RAW worth shooting. For RAW workflows, do your stripping in Lightroom / Capture One / Affinity Photo at export time. For developed JPGs, this tool is the right destination.

Everything runs in your browser. The `exifr` library (~15 KB compressed) is bundled with the page. Parsing and stripping happen client-side; the image, its location data, and any other sensitive metadata never leave your tab. Verify in DevTools — the only network request during use is the page itself and the parser library, both from the site's own origin.