Lossless means lossless
Most “remove EXIF” tools decode your photo and save a brand new JPG. That quietly throws away detail, flattens 10-bit colour and changes the format. This tool doesn’t touch the image at all. It rewrites the HEIC container without the metadata you’ve chosen to remove and copies the compressed photo data across unchanged.
The result:
- Same pixels. Bit-identical to the original. Not “visually identical”, actually identical.
- Same format. Still a .heic, still about half the size of a JPG.
- Smaller, if anything. The file shrinks by however much metadata was removed.
If you do want a JPG, switch the output format. That route re-encodes, so it’s no longer lossless, but it’s handy when the recipient can’t open HEIC.
Pick what goes
| Option | Removes | Keep it when |
|---|---|---|
| Location | GPS coordinates, altitude, direction | You want dates and camera info for sorting or editing |
| Camera & lens | Phone model, lens, exposure settings | You’re sharing photography tips and want them visible |
| Timestamps | Date and time taken | You need photos to sort by when they were shot |
| Everything | All of the above and other EXIF | You’re posting somewhere public and want zero trail |
The before and after counts show how many metadata fields were in each file and how many remain, so you can confirm the scrub did what you expected without trusting a progress bar.
Why it matters
Metadata is invisible until it isn’t. A few situations where people get caught out:
Selling things online
That photo of the bike you’re selling on a marketplace was probably taken in your hallway. If the platform passes the original file through, the GPS tag points at your front door, next to a listing that says “valuable item here”.
Posting to forums, blogs and your own site
Plenty of sites serve your upload as-is. Anyone can download it and read the EXIF, including a date pattern of when you’re home.
Journalism and sources
A photo from a source can reveal the exact phone model, the time to the second and the location. Strip it before publishing or forwarding, and check the result in the HEIC metadata viewer.
Only worried about location?
Then you don’t need the full scrub. Remove GPS from HEIC takes out the coordinates and leaves dates and camera details alone, so your library stays organised. For a clean JPG in one step, use HEIC to JPG without metadata.
No upload, by design
It would be a strange privacy tool that asked you to upload the photos first. Cleaning runs in your browser tab, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.