What hides inside your photos
A photo file carries far more than the picture. Phones write the exact GPS coordinates of the shot, the device model and OS version, and the precise second it was taken. Cameras embed serial numbers that tie every photo to one physical body. Editors like Photoshop and Lightroom log their own records into XMP, sometimes including author names from the software license. None of this is visible in the image, and all of it travels with the file when you post it to a marketplace, attach it to an email, or share the original. A photo of a couch for sale can carry your home address with it. If you want to see what a specific file reveals before cleaning it, the free image metadata viewer shows every field this tool removes.
Lossless removal, not re-encoding
Many metadata removers work by re-encoding the whole image, which silently costs quality: a JPG recompressed at 90 percent is measurably worse than the original. This tool works at the byte level instead. For JPG, PNG, and WebP it walks the file structure, removes the metadata segments, and stitches the remaining bytes back together. The pixel data is never decoded, so the cleaned file is bit-for-bit identical in image quality, and usually slightly smaller. HEIC, AVIF, GIF, and BMP have no such safe byte-level path, so those formats fall back to a clean re-encode at high quality, and the tool tells you which method was used on every run.
Why keep the color profile
The one metadata block worth keeping is the ICC color profile. It describes how the colors in the file should be displayed and contains nothing personal, no location, no dates, no device identifiers. Removing it can visibly shift colors, especially for photos edited in a wide-gamut space like Display P3 or Adobe RGB. That is why the option is on by default. Turn it off only if you need every last non-pixel byte gone, for example when a platform requires fully profile-free uploads.
For AI artists and everyone else
AI-generated PNG files deserve special mention: Stable Diffusion WebUI and ComfyUI embed the full prompt, seed, settings, and workflow into text chunks inside the file. If you sell prints, deliver client work, or just do not want your prompt engineering public, those chunks need stripping too, and this tool removes them along with everything else. Once a photo is clean you may still want it sharper or larger before sharing: the free AI image upscaler enhances it at no cost, and if the file also needs to be smaller for an upload limit, finish with the free image compressor.