Metadata Viewer
What a photo's metadata gives away, and what stripping keeps
A photo or a video is a picture wrapped in text. That text can name your camera, your software, the time and the place. Here is what the viewer reads, what the remover cuts, and the few things it keeps on purpose.
Send a photo to a stranger and you often send more than the picture. The file carries a wrapper of text written by the camera or the phone, and most apps pass it on without showing it. The metadata viewer prints that wrapper; the EXIF remover cuts it. Both read the file in your browser tab, so nothing is uploaded.
What is inside a photo
EXIF is the block a camera writes into a photo, and it is candid: the make and model of the body, the lens, the software that saved the file, the capture and modification dates, the ISO, shutter speed and aperture, the body and lens serial numbers, the owner name and often a small thumbnail of the shot. The GPS coordinates usually sit beside it, so the picture can name the place it was taken.
XMP and IPTC carry a different layer of the same story: titles, descriptions, creators, keywords and copyright. PNG files keep their text in tEXt chunks instead.
What is inside a video
Video spreads the record out. MP4 and MOV files hold user-data atoms such as ©mak, ©mod, ©swr, ©day, ©nam and ©xyz, iTunes-style ilst keys, and creation and modification times in the mvhd and tkhd headers. WebM and MKV files keep their tags in a Tags element, with a title or recording date in Info. Beside all that are the facts of the media itself: width and height, duration, codec, and any attached file such as cover art.
Read it before you share it
The viewer prints what the bytes actually contain and nothing more, including a link to OpenStreetMap when GPS coordinates are present. It writes nothing back, so the file on your device is never touched. It accepts up to 256 MB per file and 20 files at a time. Videos take longer than photos because their header tables are spread across the file, so only the parts that hold metadata are read while the media payload is skipped.
| Format | Read by the viewer | Cleaned by the remover |
|---|---|---|
| JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg, .jfif, .jpe) | Yes | Yes |
| PNG, WebP | Yes | Yes |
| GIF | Yes | Yes: the comment and any XMP block are cut |
| HEIC, HEIF | Yes | No: read and reported, but not rewritten |
| MP4, M4V, MOV | Yes | Yes |
| WebM, MKV | Yes | Yes |
How the strip works
The remover rebuilds the wrapper. The metadata blocks are dropped, and the rest of the file, every frame of video and every pixel of the image, is copied across untouched. No re-encode happens, so the picture stays bit-for-bit what it was and a JPEG whose EXIF block is cut is simply a little smaller. The result is saved as a new copy; your original is left exactly as it was.
What stays on purpose
- The ICC colour profile, because dropping it shifts the colours.
- The JFIF and Adobe markers, because they describe the file rather than the shot.
- The single EXIF orientation flag, while its box is ticked, because without it phone photos display sideways everywhere.
- A watermark or caption burned into the picture, because it is part of the image, not metadata.
- In WebM, the MuxingApp and WritingApp fields of the Info element.
A routine that works
- Open the file in the viewer and read the report: look for GPS, the owner name and serial numbers.
- Run the file through the remover and keep the cleaned copy for sharing.
- Open the cleaned copy in the viewer once more to confirm that what you meant to remove is gone.
Questions
Does removing metadata change the picture?
No. No pixels and no frames are re-encoded, so the image is bit-for-bit what it was and only the metadata blocks disappear. The cleaned file is a new copy and the original is untouched.
Can I clean a HEIC photo from an iPhone?
Not here. HEIC and HEIF files can be read and reported by the viewer, but the remover does not rewrite them.
Why does the remover keep the rotation flag?
Because without the EXIF orientation flag, photos taken on a phone would display sideways in most viewers. It stays while its box is ticked.
Is there a size limit?
Up to 256 MB per file and 20 files at a time. Files are handled one at a time, so a video is never held in memory twice over, and everything happens in your browser tab.