How to Remove Metadata From Photos (And Verify It Worked)

The instructions for this are easy to find and mostly accurate. What almost none of them tell you is that the built-in methods remove some of the metadata, not all of it, and that you cannot tell the difference by looking.

So the useful version of this guide is not just how to strip it. It is what each method actually removes, and how to confirm the result.

There is more than one kind of metadata

This is why people strip a photo and find information still in it.

EXIF is the one everybody knows: camera make and model, timestamp, exposure settings, and GPS coordinates.

IPTC holds descriptive fields — captions, keywords, credit, copyright. Common in anything that has been through a photo library or newsroom workflow.

XMP is Adobe's standard, used for editing history and a wide range of custom fields. Software often writes it alongside EXIF.

There are also maker notes — proprietary blocks that camera manufacturers write in their own formats.

A tool that says it removes EXIF may leave IPTC and XMP untouched. If you stripped a photo and something still shows up, this is usually why.

What each built-in method actually does

Windows — right-click the file, Properties, Details tab, then "Remove Properties and Personal Information". This removes the fields Windows knows how to read. XMP blocks and manufacturer-specific data often survive.

macOS Preview — Tools → Show Inspector → the info tab → GPS → Remove Location Info. This removes location only. Camera model, timestamp and everything else stay.

iPhone share sheet — tap Options at the top of the share sheet and turn off Location. Again, this is location only. Device model and capture settings go with the photo.

Android gallery apps — behaviour varies enormously by manufacturer and app version. Some remove location, some remove more, some show the option only when they detect GPS data.

None of these are wrong or useless. They are just partial, and they are usually presented as complete.

The method that removes everything

Re-encode the image. When a tool decodes an image to pixels and writes a new file, the metadata does not come along — there is nothing to carry it. This is a complete strip, including XMP and maker notes, because none of it survives the round trip.

Running a photo through our compressor or resizer does exactly this. The files are processed on your own device, which matters here more than anywhere else on this site: uploading a photo to a website in order to remove its location data means handing that location data to the website first.

The trade-off is that re-encoding a JPEG is a lossy operation. At a high quality setting the loss is invisible, but it is not nothing. If you need the pixels untouched, use a dedicated metadata tool that edits the file at byte level instead.

ExifTool is the thorough option if you are comfortable with a command line. exiftool -all= photo.jpg removes everything and works on any platform.

Verify it. Always.

This is the step that gets skipped and it is the one that matters.

Open the cleaned file in a metadata viewer and confirm the fields you cared about are actually empty. Check GPS specifically, plus the software and author fields, which are the ones that most often survive.

Two things to be careful about:

Check the cleaned copy, not the original. Easy to do by accident when both files have similar names.

Test one file before you batch the rest. Methods behave differently across file formats and sources. A method that fully cleans a JPEG from your phone may leave data in a PNG or in a file that has been through editing software.

If you would not be comfortable with the recipient seeing the GPS coordinates, the camera serial number and the full edit history, verify rather than assume.

The side effect nobody warns you about

Stripping metadata removes the orientation tag along with everything else.

Your phone does not rotate the pixels when you shoot in portrait; it stores them as the sensor captured them and adds a tag saying which way up they go. Remove that tag with a byte-level tool and the photo can appear sideways everywhere, because there is no longer anything telling software to turn it.

Re-encoding does not have this problem — the tool applies the rotation while decoding, so the correct orientation ends up baked into the pixels. But if you use ExifTool or a similar stripper and your photos suddenly lie on their side, this is what happened.

Worth checking before you publish a batch.

Stopping it at the source

If your only concern is location, the cleanest answer is not to record it.

iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → Never.

Android: the camera app's own settings have a location toggle, usually under something like "location tags".

New photos then carry no GPS at all and there is nothing to strip. The cost is that your photo library loses map views and location-based albums, which some people rely on heavily. A reasonable middle ground is to leave location on for your own organisation and strip the copies you share.

What about relying on platforms?

Large social platforms re-encode uploads and generally drop metadata from the public copy. That protects you from other users — but the platform received your original file with everything in it before removing anything.

More importantly, plenty of routes do not strip at all: email attachments, cloud storage links, direct file transfers, many marketplace and classified listings. Which platforms strip and which do not is worth knowing, but the reliable policy is simpler: strip before you upload, and then it does not matter.

The short version

Metadata comes in several standards and most built-in tools only remove one of them. Windows removes what it can read; macOS Preview and the iPhone share sheet remove location only. Re-encoding the image removes everything as a side effect, at a small cost in quality. Whatever method you use, open the cleaned file and check — and if your photos turn sideways afterwards, the orientation tag went with the rest.