How to strip EXIF and GPS out of a photo

A JPEG is not just pixels. Tucked into the header is the camera body, the lens, the exposure, the date to the second, often the camera's serial number, and if the shot came from a phone or a GPS enabled body, the coordinates of where you stood. Most of the time none of that matters. The times it matters, it matters a lot.

What is actually in the file

Open any camera JPEG in a metadata viewer and you will typically find:

• Camera and lens: make, model, and on most bodies the serial number. The serial number is the one photographers do not expect. It links every frame you have ever published to the same body.
• Exposure: shutter, aperture, ISO, focal length, flash, white balance. Harmless, and genuinely useful to other photographers.
• Timestamps: capture time to the second, usually in local time with no zone, sometimes with a modify time that reveals when you edited it.
• GPS: latitude, longitude and often altitude. Standard on phones. Present on any body with GPS or a paired phone app.
• Software and edit history: which version of which editor touched it.
• Thumbnails: an embedded preview that on some older pipelines still shows the uncropped original.

You can see all of this yourself with the EXIF viewer, which reads the file in your browser without uploading it.

When to care

Not always. Stripping metadata from a portfolio image throws away information that helps you and helps other photographers, and it removes your copyright field if you set one. Reasons it genuinely matters:

• Anything shot at a private home. A newborn session, a boudoir shoot, an in home family session. The coordinates are the client's front door, and they are in every frame.
• Photographs of children, for the same reason, with a lower tolerance for error.
• Anyone being photographed who has a safety reason to not be found. You will not always be told.
• Documentary and press work where a subject could be identified by location and time together.
• Anything you post to a platform that keeps the original, as opposed to the ones that strip metadata on upload. Which platforms strip and which keep changes without announcement, so do not rely on it.

The rule that survives contact with real work: strip location from anything shot where someone lives or sleeps, and leave the rest alone unless there is a reason.

How to remove it

In the browser, nothing uploaded. The metadata remover runs entirely on your machine: the file never leaves the tab, which matters when the whole point is privacy. Drop the photo in, get a clean copy out. No account, and it never asks for your email.

On a Mac, without any tool. Preview can do a partial job: open the image, Tools, Show Inspector, the GPS tab, then Remove Location Info. It removes coordinates and leaves the rest, which is often exactly what you want.

In bulk, on the command line. If you have exiftool installed:

exiftool -gps:all= -o clean/ *.jpg          # coordinates only
exiftool -all= -o clean/ *.jpg              # everything

The -o writes copies into a clean folder instead of overwriting your originals, which is the version of this command you want.

What not to do: do not rely on a screenshot, which changes the pixels as well as the metadata, and do not rely on a platform stripping it for you.

What you should not strip

Stripping everything is a blunt instrument. Two fields are worth keeping deliberately:

• Copyright and creator. If you set them, they are the only claim of authorship travelling with the file. exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -copyright -artist clears the file and puts those two back.
• Colour profile. Not strictly EXIF, but some crude strippers take the ICC profile with everything else and the image shifts. Check one file before you run a batch of four hundred.

And keep an untouched master. Metadata removal is one way: once the coordinates are gone, they are gone.

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