Hidden metadata
What is your photo telling people?
A photo file carries a block of metadata in front of the picture: camera, settings, software, timestamps, and on most phones the coordinates. Drop a file to read what yours holds. Nothing is uploaded.
Compressing already removes all of it. Compress to a file size →
Why read it here rather than upload it somewhere
Sending a file to a server to find out whether it discloses your home address is a strange way to protect it. This page never transmits anything: the bytes are parsed in the tab, by the same kind of code a desktop tool would run, and they are gone when you close it.
That also means it works offline once the page has loaded, and that there is no queue, no size cap and no account.
What you are looking at
The first table lists the blocks in the file and what each weighs. A JPEG is a chain of labelled segments. The picture is one of them; the rest are metadata that most software never shows you: EXIF from the camera, XMP from an editor, IPTC captions and keywords, an ICC colour profile.
The second table lists the fields worth reading. Highlighted rows are the ones that identify you or your equipment rather than describing the photograph: coordinates, serial numbers, author and copyright strings, free-text comments.
Fields the file contains but that say nothing useful about you are counted, not printed. A raw dump of two hundred entries teaches nobody anything.
Common questions
My photo shows no metadata at all. Is that normal?
Very. Anything that re-encodes an image drops the metadata as a side effect, so a file that has been through a social network, a messaging app or a website upload pipeline usually arrives clean. That tells you nothing about the copy still on your phone.
Does removing metadata make the file smaller?
Barely. Measured across a real folder of photographs, metadata came to 0.24% of total weight, and 0.41% on a camera original full of editing history. If you need a smaller file you need fewer pixels, not fewer tags.
Why is the clean copy a JPEG, and why is it a different size?
Because there is no way to write a file without metadata other than to write a new file. The pixels are re-encoded at high quality and nothing else is carried across: no camera, no serial number, no coordinates. Depending on how the original was saved, the result may be slightly larger or smaller; if that matters, use the size tool instead and give it a limit.
Will my photo come out sideways?
No. Phones record the picture as the sensor saw it and note the rotation in a tag, which is exactly the tag being removed. So the rotation is applied to the pixels first, and the clean copy is upright by construction, that is the single most common way a metadata stripper goes wrong.
Why can it not read my HEIC file?
HEIC stores its metadata in a completely different container, and most browsers cannot even decode the image. Convert it to JPEG first. On an iPhone, sharing or emailing the photo usually converts it on the way out.
What about the embedded thumbnail?
EXIF can carry a small preview written when the shot was taken. Some editors update the picture and forget the preview, leaving a file whose visible image is cropped and whose hidden thumbnail is not. When one is present it is flagged, and the clean copy has none.