Metadata removal for photos and videos

No. The tool decodes and re-compresses nothing: for a photo it cuts out the housekeeping bytes and copies the compressed pixel data one-to-one; for a video it rewrites only the index (moov) while frames and sound stay the very same bytes. This is verified by a byte-for-byte comparison of decoded pixels and by per-frame checksums of the video before and after cleaning — they match.

In several places at once. An iPhone writes the coordinates, model and capture time into QuickTime keys (com.apple.quicktime.location.ISO6709 and its neighbors), Android and most apps use the ©xyz or loci atoms, action cameras record a whole GPS track along the clip. On top of that the date and time sit in the headers of the video and of each track, which most "metadata removers" leave in place. Here every one of those places is cleared, and the data of a removed track is overwritten with zeros.

The label in the metadata — yes: a signed C2PA manifest and XMP/IPTC notes saying that the image was made by a neural network are removed along with the rest. But a watermark woven into the pixels themselves (such as SynthID or TrustMark) and a visible mark on the picture are beyond any metadata cleaner, and platforms may recognize AI images by other means. Removing it changes what the file says about itself — not how it was made.

Because rotation is stored in EXIF too: the phone shoots in portrait but writes a landscape frame plus an orientation tag. Removers that delete EXIF wholesale take that tag with it. Here a single orientation tag is kept by default — a number from 1 to 8, which identifies nobody.

Some phones append extra data after the end of the image. On Samsung and Google devices this is a Motion Photo — a complete video file with the sound of whatever was happening a couple of seconds around the shot. The MPF format adds extra full-size images. Technically none of it is metadata, which is why most removers never notice it.

Yes, and the file stays HEIC — it is not converted to JPEG. HEIC is an ISO-BMFF container: the metadata entries sit in one place and the data itself next to the pixels. The tool rewrites the entries and wipes the data without moving a single image byte, so the file size does not change. Location only mode removes just the coordinates from a HEIC and keeps the date and camera.

A name like IMG_20240612_143022.jpg states the date and the minute of the shot even when not a single tag is left inside the file. That is why there is a neutral-names option: files get sequential names — image_0001.jpg, video_0001.mp4.

Up to 500 files per run; the daily limit is shown on the page and depends on your account. Re-processing the same files on the same day does not use up the limit. A video is never loaded into memory whole: only its index is read, so a long clip is done in seconds.

Yes. Under the Location row, choose what stays instead of the point: district — the coordinates are rounded to a grid cell about a kilometer across — or city — the center of the nearest city is written into the file (with no city nearby, the precision is about 10 km). The altitude, the satellite time, the shooting direction and the accuracy go with the exact point. The rounding follows a grid rather than a random shift, so several photos taken at one spot do not give it away by their average. To find the city, a cell about 2 km across is sent to the server, not the point itself. It works for videos too: the same fields are rewritten in iPhone and Android clips.