What's actually in there
A photo file is two things: the picture, and a filing card the camera stapled to it. The card is usually more revealing than people expect.
| Field | What it tells someone |
|---|---|
| GPS coordinates | Where you stood, often within a few metres. Home, school, workplace. |
| Date & time | When, to the second — including the camera's time zone offset. |
| Make, model, serial | Which camera. Serial numbers link separate photos to one owner. |
| Lens & settings | Exactly how the picture was made. The useful part, if you are learning. |
| Software | What edited it, and sometimes the operating system version. |
| Artist & copyright | Whatever you typed into your camera once and forgot about. |
Large social platforms usually strip metadata because they re-encode everything you upload. Messaging apps, email attachments, shared cloud links and files handed over on a drive generally do not. The safest assumption is that a file you send directly still carries everything.
How the stripping works
Most "remove EXIF" tools redraw your photo into a canvas and re-encode it as a new JPEG. That does remove the metadata — and also throws away image quality, because it is a second lossy compression of an already compressed file.
This one rewrites the JPEG at the container level instead. It walks the file's segment structure, drops the APP1 block (EXIF and XMP), the APP13 block (IPTC) and any comment segments, and copies the compressed image data across untouched. The result is bit-for-bit identical pixels with the filing card removed.
The embedded colour profile in APP2 is deliberately kept, because removing it makes colours shift in anything that respects profiles. If you need that gone too, it is a colour-management decision rather than a privacy one.
For non-JPEG files the tool can read metadata but not rewrite the container, so no strip button appears. Re-saving a HEIC as JPEG from your operating system's export dialog is the practical route there.
Common questions
Is my photo really not uploaded?
Really. The file is read with the browser's File API and parsed in JavaScript on your machine. There is no backend on this domain to receive it, no analytics, and no third-party scripts. Turn off your connection after the page loads and it still works — which is the easiest way to verify the claim yourself.
Why does my photo have no EXIF at all?
Because something already stripped it. Screenshots have almost none, downloads from social platforms are usually clean, and many messaging apps re-encode on send. An empty result usually means the file has already been through a pipeline.
Can I edit EXIF here?
Not yet — this reads and removes. Writing metadata correctly across every camera's quirks is a much larger job, and doing it badly corrupts files.
What is the difference between EXIF, IPTC and XMP?
EXIF is written by the camera and describes the capture. IPTC is the press standard for captions, credits and keywords. XMP is Adobe's XML format that carries edit history and often duplicates the other two. The strip button removes all three.
Does removing EXIF hurt my photo?
Not for viewing or printing. You do lose the record of how you took it, which is genuinely useful for learning, and you lose orientation flags — although this tool leaves the pixels untouched, so anything that was upright stays upright.
Related tools
A camera that collects nothing.
Lucid has no account, no analytics and no servers. Location tags are off by default, and when you turn them on the coordinates go into your file — not to us.