Photo Cleaner

How this protects your privacy

Photos taken on phones and cameras usually carry hidden metadata (EXIF): the exact GPS location where the photo was taken, the camera model and serial number, the date and time, and the software used. Sharing a photo can share all of that too.

This tool reads that metadata locally in your browser and shows you what's there. Cleaning works by decoding the image to raw pixels and re-encoding a brand-new file, so the cleaned copy contains only the picture — no EXIF, no GPS, no maker notes, no embedded thumbnails. Your original file is never modified.

Honest limitations

• Re-encoding a JPEG re-compresses it, which can slightly change image quality. Use the quality slider to choose the trade-off. PNGs stay lossless.
• HEIC photos (iPhone) are decoded right here in your browser by a bundled open-source decoder (libheif compiled to WebAssembly) and saved as clean JPEGs — still no upload, ever.
• RAW files (DNG, CR2, NEF, ARW…) can't be fully developed by a browser. Instead, the full-size JPEG preview embedded inside every RAW is extracted and cleaned — the result is clearly labeled. Keep your RAW for editing; share the clean JPEG.
• The inspector shows the most common sensitive fields, not every tag that may exist. Cleaning removes all of them regardless, because the file is rebuilt from pixels.
• Metadata is not the only way a photo can identify you — the picture itself (faces, street signs, reflections) still can. To black out or pixelate image content, use The Redactor.
• For legal, medical, or other high-stakes material, verify results with a professional redaction workflow before sharing.

Same shelf: The Redactor blacks out what the photo shows, not just what it says · Form Desk strips metadata from PDFs the same way · Hush hides a secret message inside a photo · Scan Desk turns photos of documents into clean PDFs · File Mill converts between image formats.

Part of K-Engine Local Tools — free, privacy-respecting utilities that run on your device. Open source; the code is small enough to audit over coffee. MIT licensed, from the K-Engine workshop · download the source.