What is hiding inside a photo
A JPEG from a phone or camera carries a block of EXIF metadata alongside the pixels. The obvious fields are the camera make and model, the lens, the exact date and time, ISO, aperture, shutter speed and focal length. The dangerous one is GPS: most phones record latitude and longitude for every shot unless location access for the camera app has been disabled. A photo of a sofa you are selling can quietly point at your front door.
This page reads that data with the exifr library directly from the file in your browser. Drop a photo and within a moment you see the fields listed above, and if coordinates are present they are shown first, highlighted, with a link that opens the location on OpenStreetMap so you can confirm what the file reveals. If the parser finds nothing, the page says the file is already clean. JPG, PNG and WebP are accepted; PNG and WebP rarely carry EXIF, so for them the clean result is the usual one.
How the clean copy is made
Stripping works by re-encoding rather than by editing bytes. The image is decoded, drawn onto a canvas, and saved again as either JPEG at quality 95 or as PNG. A canvas export contains pixels and nothing else, so the result has no EXIF, no XMP, no IPTC and no embedded thumbnail. That last point matters: some tools that only delete the main EXIF block leave the small preview thumbnail inside, which can still show the uncropped original. Here there is no thumbnail because there is no metadata container at all.
The trade-off is that a JPEG is re-compressed once. At quality 95 the difference is invisible in normal viewing, but it is not bit-identical. A 4032x3024 photo of 2.6 MB typically becomes 2.0 to 3.5 MB after the clean JPEG export, sometimes larger than the original because 95 is a higher setting than most phones use. If you want a smaller file at the same time, take the clean copy to compress and set the quality yourself; that page also produces metadata-free output.
Orientation, transparency and colour
Portrait photos are stored sideways with an EXIF orientation flag telling viewers to rotate them. Since the flag is removed, the browser applies the rotation to the pixels when it decodes the file, so the clean copy displays upright everywhere. If the source has transparency, choose PNG; the JPEG option fills the background white before drawing. The embedded colour profile is dropped as well, which makes a wide-gamut photo look marginally flatter on screens that can show more than sRGB. For social media and email that is irrelevant; for print work keep the original alongside.
When to strip and when not to
Strip before posting on classified sites, forums, dating profiles, or anywhere strangers can download the full file. Strip before sending a photo of a document or a home interior by email or messenger; many messengers send the file as-is. Do not strip your own master copies. The timestamp, lens and settings are useful for organising a library, and the GPS tag is what lets a photo app build a map of your trips. Make a clean copy for sharing and keep the original.
The reading and the re-encode both happen in the browser; the file is never sent to a server, and closing the tab discards it. For background on what the different platforms do with metadata, see how to remove EXIF data. And note that this page does not blur anything: if the picture itself shows a face or a plate, use blur faces and data after cleaning the metadata.