ARDOtools

Image Metadata Cleaner

Strip the hidden data out of a photo — GPS coordinates, camera model, timestamps — and save a clean copy. Free, no sign-up required.

How it works

  1. Choose an image

    Any common image format works. The controls appear once a file is chosen.

  2. It is redrawn, not edited

    The picture is painted onto a fresh canvas and encoded again from the pixels alone. Nothing is deleted from anything — a new image is built that never had the metadata in the first place, which is why there is nothing left to recover.

  3. Download the clean copy

    Saved beside the original name with -clean appended, in whichever format you picked. Your original file is untouched on disk.

Who this is for

Photos with GPS

Phone cameras can record where a picture was taken to within a few metres. Posting the photo publishes that too, and most platforms strip it only after it has reached them.

Selling online

A listing photo can carry the coordinates of the house it was taken in, which is an unusually direct way to tell strangers where the item is.

Dating and social profiles

Location and device data attached to a personal photo is rarely something anyone meant to share, and it is the sort that is hard to take back.

Sending documents

Scans and screenshots can carry device, software and timestamp details that say more about how a document was produced than you intended.

Questions

What exactly gets removed?
Everything outside the pixels: EXIF, including GPS coordinates, camera make and model, lens, exposure settings and timestamps, plus any embedded thumbnail, XMP and IPTC blocks. Re-encoding from a canvas keeps the image and nothing else. For JPEG files the page also tells you what it found before you clean, such as the camera, a GPS location and the date.
Does the image quality change?
Re-encoding a JPEG re-compresses it, so there is some further loss on top of whatever the original already had. Choosing PNG avoids adding any, at the cost of a much larger file for a photograph.
Do social networks strip metadata for me?
Most strip it from the version they display, but not always before the original has been received and stored, and not consistently across every upload path. Anywhere you hand over the original file directly — email, a marketplace listing, a shared drive, a messaging app that sends as a document — the metadata usually travels with it.
Does removing metadata make a photo anonymous?
No. It removes the attached data, not what the picture shows. A recognisable street, a house number, a window or a reflection is still in the pixels, and so is anything identifiable about the subject.
Could it change how the colours look?
It can. An embedded colour profile is metadata too, so it goes with the rest, and an image that relied on a wide-gamut profile may look slightly flatter afterwards. For a photo headed to a website that is usually invisible; for print work, keep the original.
Which output format should I pick?
PNG if the image is a screenshot, a diagram or anything with text and flat colour, and if you would rather not add compression. JPEG for photographs where file size matters. WebP if you know the places it is going support it, which most browsers now do.
Why does the page say what it found before I clean?
Seeing the camera model, the date and whether a GPS location is stored makes the risk concrete before you decide to share the photo. The check reads the Exif block of JPEG files only. A file with no Exif block can still carry other metadata, which is why cleaning re-encodes the image rather than trusting the check.