EXIF Viewer & Metadata Remover

What is EXIF metadata, and what does it expose?

Every photo file is two things at once: the compressed picture, and a set of hidden data blocks wrapped around it. EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is the largest of those blocks. It was designed so cameras could record their own settings, and it is stored as a small TIFF structure tucked into a JPEG's APP1 marker segment, a PNG's eXIf chunk, or a WebP's EXIF chunk. A typical smartphone photo carries the make and model of the phone, the exact lens, the shutter speed, aperture, ISO and focal length, the orientation the phone was held in, the second the shutter fired, and — the part almost nobody expects — the latitude, longitude and altitude of the place it was taken. Alongside EXIF, files often carry XMP (an XML block written by Lightroom, Photoshop and Snapseed), IPTC records inside a JPEG's APP13 segment, plain text comments, and PNG tEXt/iTXt/zTXt chunks that editors use for arbitrary notes. GPS is stored in a way that hides how precise it really is. Latitude and longitude are each three rational numbers — degrees, minutes and seconds — plus a one-letter reference (N/S, E/W) that decides the hemisphere. Converted to decimal degrees, a typical phone writes six decimal places, which resolves to roughly ten centimetres. That is not "the neighbourhood"; that is a specific doorway. Social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and X strip EXIF when they re-encode uploads, which is why people assume the problem is solved. It is not. Email attachments, cloud drive links, Discord and Slack file shares, marketplace listings, forum posts, self-hosted galleries and anything you send over a messaging app in "original quality" all keep the original bytes intact — GPS included. The Software field leaks something subtler but still real: it tells a reader which app touched the file, which can quietly reveal that a "straight out of camera" photo was retouched, or which paid tools a business actually uses. Removing all of this is a header-level edit, not an image edit. The compressed pixel stream never has to be decoded, so a correct EXIF remover produces a file that is smaller but visually and mathematically identical.