The file is read here and reported here
Of every tool on this site, this is the one where the promise carries weight, because the thing you are checking for is precisely the thing you would not want transmitted. The bytes are read with FileReader and the EXIF structure is walked in JavaScript inside the page. No request is made, no copy is kept, and there is no server holding anything to delete later. The way to satisfy yourself is not to believe this paragraph: open the network tab before choosing a file, or pull the connection and inspect a photo offline.
What is actually in there
EXIF is a TIFF directory tucked into a JPEG's APP1 segment, and cameras fill it generously. The capture timestamp to the second. Make and model of the body. Lens model on most interchangeable-lens cameras. Full exposure settings. On a fair number of bodies, the owner name field and the serial number, which correlates every frame that camera has ever produced regardless of what account posted them. And if location services were on when the shutter fired, latitude and longitude.
Outdoors with a clear sky the coordinates are typically accurate to a few metres — enough to identify a building, not a district. Indoors the error grows but rarely past the block. The compounding problem is repetition: several photos taken at home, posted over months, cluster around one point, and the cluster is more informative than any single frame.
Sharing an original shares all of it
The metadata is part of the file, not part of the display. Renaming it changes nothing. Moving it to another folder changes nothing. Anyone who receives the original receives the block, and every image viewer, phone gallery and file manager will show it to them without any special effort.
The large social platforms do strip EXIF during upload, which is why the assumption "it gets removed automatically" is so widespread. It is only true on that path. Email attachments keep it. Cloud storage share links keep it, because they serve the original bytes. Direct file transfer keeps it. Most self-hosted forums and ticketing systems keep it. Messaging apps vary by app and by whether you sent the photo as an image or as a document — sending as a document almost always preserves the original exactly.
Reading is not removing
Nothing on this page modifies your file. It parses and reports; the photo is untouched afterwards. To strip the metadata you have to write a new file, and the simplest route is a canvas round trip: any tool here that resizes, crops, rotates or compresses reads the pixels and encodes a fresh file from them, and the metadata, not being pixels, does not come along. The rotate and flip tool is the usual choice because you can make it produce a geometrically identical output.
The exception on this site is the Base64 encoder, which copies the original bytes verbatim and therefore carries the EXIF block straight through into the string. That is the correct behaviour for what it does, and a trap if you assumed otherwise.
Cases where you want to keep it
Insurance claims, defect reports, site inspections and anything else where "when and where" is the evidence need the metadata intact, and re-saving the file destroys the very thing that makes it useful. Resizing it to fit an email destroys it too. Establish two copies from the start — the untouched original for submission, and a stripped duplicate for anything you share — and check the original here before you need it, rather than discovering at submission time that a well-meaning edit already emptied it.
Questions people ask
It says no capture information. Is the tool broken?
Almost certainly not. Screenshots have no EXIF because no camera was involved. Photos received through a messaging app, downloaded from a social platform, or re-saved by any editor have usually had it removed already. Files converted to PNG or WebP lose it in the conversion. An empty result is the common result, and it is the safe state to be in.
Can I remove just the GPS and keep the date?
Not with this tool, which only reads. Selective removal needs something that rewrites the block field by field: the iPhone share options, the Android gallery details view, or Windows Properties then Remove Properties will each let you choose. The canvas round trip through any image tool here is all-or-nothing — everything goes at once.
Why will my iPhone photo not open?
HEIC is not a format browsers decode outside Safari, so the file cannot be drawn and the tool cannot proceed. Set Camera then Formats to Most Compatible in iOS settings and new photos are written as JPEG. Existing HEIC files convert to JPEG when you share or email them with the appropriate option, and the converted copy can be inspected here.
It reports GPS attached but shows no coordinates.
The GPS directory exists but the latitude and longitude tags in it are empty, truncated, or written in a form this parser declines to trust. The honest reading is that location data may well be present in a shape this tool cannot decode, so treat the file as carrying a location until something more thorough — ExifTool, for instance — says otherwise.