INITIALISATION DU SYSTÈME...
EXIF is the structured record a camera or phone writes into every photo: date and time, camera and lens model, exposure settings, orientation, sometimes a serial number, and — when location services are on — a full GPS position stored in a dedicated GPS IFD. Posting a photo with its EXIF intact hands all of that to anyone who downloads it. GhostMeta removes EXIF data online without uploading anything: the file is decoded in your browser, the EXIF tags are listed so you can see the exposure, and a clean copy is rebuilt with the entire EXIF block removed. The GPS coordinates go first, along with the device identifiers that let someone fingerprint every photo you have ever shared. There is no server round-trip, no queue and no account — drop a JPEG or PNG, read what the camera recorded, and download a version that carries none of it. For a photo that has already been resized or screenshotted, GhostMeta still checks for residual EXIF and strips whatever remains.
Drop a JPEG or a PNG, GhostMeta lists its EXIF tags then returns a copy holding none of them. GPS position, camera model, serial number and timestamps all go together. Everything happens in your browser: the file is sent nowhere, and you can confirm that in the Network tab. Free, no account.
A smartphone photo carries between 40 and 150 EXIF tags depending on the device. The revealing ones are not the exposure settings but the identifiers: the exact camera model, sometimes its serial number, and the firmware version. Two photos published in different places months apart can be linked through those fields alone, with no GPS coordinate involved.
Capture time is stored three times over — DateTimeOriginal, DateTimeDigitized, DateTime — and all three survive cropping. Editing software writes its own trace into the Software field. That is how an image is shown to have been altered, when, and with what.
A service that strips EXIF server-side receives the intact photo first, EXIF included. Removal happens after transmission, and you have no way to audit what was logged in between. The file exists, at minimum, in disk cache for the duration of processing.
GhostMeta decodes the image in tab memory and re-encodes it through the Canvas API. A canvas gives back pixels and nothing else: every metadata block is lost on write, by construction rather than by filtering. No network request carries the photo, which you can confirm in your browser's Network tab.
Test on a single photo first, not on the whole batch: read its fields, clean it, read the copy back. You will then know exactly what your device writes, and you will stop wondering about the next ones.
Keep the original if the image has archival value, since cleaning goes through a re-encode. And remember that screenshotting a photo does not remove everything: it creates a fresh file with no original EXIF, but it degrades the image and sometimes leaves screen metadata behind.
| Tag group | What it exposes | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| GPS IFD | Latitude, longitude, altitude, heading, sometimes a place name | Critical |
| Make, Model, SerialNumber | Exact device, reusable to link your photos together | Critical |
| DateTimeOriginal | Exact capture date and time | High |
| Software, ProcessingSoftware | Editing tool used, therefore evidence of modification | Medium |
| ExposureTime, FNumber, ISO | Photographic settings, nothing personal | Low |
| Orientation, ColorSpace | Correct display of the image | None |
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is metadata the camera embeds: timestamp, camera and lens model, exposure, orientation and — if geotagging is enabled — GPS latitude and longitude in a dedicated GPS IFD.
No. The EXIF is read and stripped locally in your browser. The photo never touches a server, so removing EXIF online here is as private as doing it offline.
Yes. The GPS IFD is part of the EXIF block and is removed with everything else, so the downloaded copy has no coordinates.
JPEG and PNG directly; HEIC (iPhone) is converted in-browser then cleaned; WebP is supported. Most photos people share online are JPEG, where EXIF is most common.
Yes — GhostMeta shows the full EXIF table first, flagging sensitive fields like GPS, so you can confirm what is there before downloading the stripped copy.
Yes. Removing EXIF from a single photo is free with no sign-up. Batch cleaning of many files at once is a Premium convenience.