Photo & Document Privacy Tools
Every photo your phone takes carries a hidden block of data inside the file — most importantly, the GPS coordinates of where you were standing. It travels with the image when you email it, message it or post it to a forum. These tools let you see exactly what is in there and strip it out, without the file ever leaving your device.
Metadata Viewer
See hidden EXIF, GPS & metadata
Remove EXIF
Strip photo metadata & GPS
Protect PDF
Add a password to your PDF
Check first, then strip
Stripping metadata blindly works, but you learn nothing about what your device has been recording. Doing it in two steps once is worth the extra minute.
See what is actually in the file
Open the metadata viewer and drop in a recent photo from your phone. Sensitive fields are flagged, and if GPS coordinates are present you get a map link showing precisely the location a recipient could extract.
Open the metadata viewerStrip it
The EXIF remover rebuilds the image without any metadata block — GPS, camera serial, timestamps and all — and hands back a clean file to download.
Remove EXIF dataVerify it worked
Run the cleaned file back through the viewer. It should come back empty. This is the step almost nobody does, and it is the only way to be sure rather than hopeful.
Re-check the cleaned file
What is hidden inside a photo
Not every field matters equally. This is roughly how they rank for everyday risk:
| Field | What it reveals | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| GPS coordinates | The exact latitude and longitude where the photo was taken, often accurate to a few metres. | High |
| Date & time taken | The precise moment of capture, including timezone on many devices. | Medium |
| Camera make, model & serial | Which device took it — the serial number can link separate photos to one physical camera. | Medium |
| Owner & artist tags | Some cameras embed a name or copyright string configured once and then forgotten. | Medium |
| Software & edit history | Which app processed the image, which can reveal workflow or that an image was edited. | Low |
| Exposure settings | Aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length. Harmless on its own. | Low |
When this genuinely matters
Selling something online
Marketplace listings are the classic case: photos taken at home, posted publicly, carrying the coordinates of your front door to anyone who downloads them.
Posting under a pseudonym
A camera serial number is a persistent identifier. It can tie an anonymous account's images to photos you posted elsewhere under your real name.
Sending documents to strangers
PDFs of a CV or an application often carry an author field with a real name or an employer's internal username, set years ago and never revisited.
Photographing other people
Location data attached to a photo of someone else discloses their whereabouts, not just yours — worth stripping before you forward it on.
Sharing a scanned document instead? Run it through OCR to pull out just the text you need, or password-protect the PDF before sending it. Everything on this site runs in your browser — see how we handle data.
Frequently asked questions
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a block of information your camera or phone writes inside the image file itself. It travels with the photo when you send it. It commonly includes the GPS coordinates of where the shot was taken, the exact date and time, and the camera's make, model and serial number.
Very likely, if it came from a phone with location services enabled for the camera. The fastest way to know is to check: open the metadata viewer and drop the photo in. If GPS coordinates are present they are shown along with a map link, so you can see exactly what a recipient could see.
Most large platforms do strip it from the version they publish, but that is not something you can verify, it varies by platform and upload path, and it happens only after you have already transmitted the original file — metadata included — to their servers. Stripping it yourself before uploading is the only version of this you control.
The remover re-encodes the image, so a JPEG is recompressed once. At the quality setting used the visible difference is negligible for normal viewing and sharing, but it is not mathematically lossless. If you need the pristine original, keep a copy before stripping.
No — and that matters more here than anywhere else on the site, because the whole point is that these files are sensitive. Both tools run entirely in your browser. You can open the Network tab in your browser's developer tools and watch: no request carries your image.
Yes. PDFs carry document properties including title, author, subject, the creating application, and creation and modification timestamps. The author field routinely leaks a real name or an internal username. The metadata viewer reads these as well as image EXIF.
Screenshots generally contain no GPS data, since no camera was involved. They can still carry the device and software information, and of course whatever is visible in the image itself — which is frequently the bigger risk.
Explore more free tools
Every category runs free in your browser — nothing is uploaded.