What this is, and what it refuses to do
A set of tools that take one thing off a file: the part you did not write yourself. The bytes that say where you were, what phone you used, who the author is, which program wrote the document.
There is no server that could accept your file
Most online metadata removers work the same way: you upload, their machine edits, you download. That is a reasonable design, and it means the file passes through a computer you do not control.
This one is built the other way round. Every file is opened by the page, parsed by JavaScript, and rewritten in memory. There is no endpoint that accepts an upload — not a hidden one, not a disabled one. The site's own Content-Security-Policy only permits connections back to this domain and to Cloudflare's analytics endpoint. A script that tried to send your photo anywhere else would be blocked before it left the tab — open the network panel and you will see that dropping a file produces no request at all.
The file is edited, not re-encoded
There are two ways to strip metadata. The crude one is to open the image into a canvas and save it again: everything goes, including the pixels, which come back slightly different and often in a different format. The careful one is to find the metadata where it sits and take it out, leaving every other byte where it was.
These tools do the second thing, per container:
| Format | What is removed | What happens to the rest |
|---|---|---|
| JPEG | EXIF, XMP, IPTC, C2PA blocks | Compressed image data is untouched; the orientation flag is kept so portrait shots stay upright |
| PNG | tEXt, iTXt, zTXt, eXIf, caBX (C2PA), tIME |
Pixels are never decoded; the image chunks are copied as they are |
| Info dictionary (author, title, producer), XMP stream | Values are overwritten with spaces, so no byte offset moves and the cross-reference table stays valid | |
| MP4 / MOV | udta box — GPS, make and model, encoder, comments |
If removal shifts the media data, the stco offset table is rewritten to match |
| MP3 | ID3v2, ID3v1, APE tags | Audio frames are copied byte for byte |
Four things this does not do
It does not support HEIC. iPhone photos are often HEIC, and this tool cannot read them yet. It will say so rather than fail quietly.
It cannot erase a compressed PDF metadata stream. In PDF 1.5 and later the info dictionary can be packed into a deflate stream. In that case the reference is detached so no reader reports the author again, but the bytes are still inside the file. Unpacking and rebuilding would move every offset — which is the exact thing the in-place design avoids.
It does not remove structural timestamps. An MP4 keeps a creation time in its container header; removing it means re-encoding, so it stays. This is stated on the video page instead of being left for you to discover.
It does not claim to detect AI images. The checker reports what a file says about itself. Most AI images say nothing, and a marker can be removed in one click. Evidence when present, not proof when absent.
Where the field definitions come from
The names and structures this tool reads are not invented here. They are defined by the organisations that maintain the formats:
- W3C — PNG specification, for the
tEXt,iTXt,zTXtandeXIfchunks. - ExifTool tag reference, for the EXIF field names shown in the readout.
- IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, for the descriptive fields that travel with press images.
- C2PA 2.1 specification, for the provenance manifest the AI checker looks for.
- ID3v2.4 structure, for the MP3 tag frames removed on the audio page.
A small independent project, not a company
No accounts, no newsletter, no advertising, no analytics beyond a page counter. There is no sign-up to forget and no profile to leak. If a tool here is wrong, the fix is a code change — which is the only kind of fix this kind of site should need.
The files never leave your device, so there is also nothing on this end to lose.
Start with the file you care about
Photos, PDFs, video and audio — the same page logic, one format per page. Choose a tool or read what the site does and does not collect.