Remove metadata from a photo

What a photo carries besides the picture

Cameras and phones write a block of data called EXIF into each photo. Depending on the device and its settings, it can include:

• Location: GPS coordinates, whenever the camera app may use location, often precise enough to point to a single house.
• Date and time the photo was taken, to the second.
• The device: make and model of the phone or camera, sometimes the lens and a serial number.
• Settings: exposure, aperture, ISO, flash, and the software that last edited it.
• A small preview of the photo, which can still show parts you cropped away if a program did not update it.

Windows shows much of this: right-click a photo, choose Properties, then the Details tab. Scroll down to the GPS section to see whether a photo knows where it was taken.

Why it matters before you share

Most of the time nobody looks. The trouble is the times someone does:

• A photo of something you sell online, taken at home, can give away your address.
• Pictures of children can show where they live, go to school or play.
• A photo sent to a stranger, a landlord or a dating match can share more than you meant to.
• Dates and places across many photos sketch a routine: when you leave home and where you go.

Some sites remove these details when you post, but you cannot see whether they did. An email attachment, a cloud link or a file sent as a document in a chat app arrives exactly as it left your PC, details and all.

Photographers have the opposite concern: a name and copyright note stored in the metadata are removed too. If credit matters, add a visible watermark before you export.

Why not clean it on a website?

Online metadata removers ask you to upload the photo first. That sends the very thing you want to hide, the location of your home or your child's school, to a server you know nothing about, along with the picture itself. After that you can only trust that it is deleted.

Octoolo works the other way round. The photo is opened, drawn and exported on your own computer. Nothing is sent anywhere, it works with no internet connection at all, and there is no upload or download to wait for, however large the photo.

While you are at it, you can also blur faces or crop away what should not be shown, and the same export takes care of everything at once.

For the future, your phone can stop recording the place to begin with: its camera app has a location setting or permission. Turning it off covers new photos only; the ones already taken still carry their location until you export clean copies.

How Octoolo leaves the details out

When you export, Octoolo does not copy the old file and delete fields from it. It draws the picture again from its pixels and writes a brand-new file that holds only the picture, so there is nothing left over to find. It works the same for JPG, PNG and WebP.

• The photo is encoded again. JPG and WebP are saved at the quality on the slider, 88 the first time. For no visible change, use 95 or more, or choose PNG, which loses nothing but makes a larger file.
• The rotation note goes too, but the pixels are saved upright, so the photo still shows the right way up everywhere.

The file dates Windows keeps for every file are a separate matter from EXIF: the new copy simply shows the day you exported it. Octoolo does not show or edit single EXIF fields. To keep the date but drop the location, use Remove Properties and Personal Information at the bottom of the Details tab in Windows, which lets you tick fields one by one.