Batch Metadata Strip

About the batch metadata stripper

Every photo you take carries a hidden second file: the camera and lens, the exact date and time, the settings, often the GPS coordinates of where you were standing, and increasingly a record of which AI tool generated or edited it. Send a folder of holiday photos to someone and you send all of that too.

The single-image version of this is easy. Doing it to four hundred photos is the problem. This tool takes a whole folder in one pass: pick it, press one button, and get back a ZIP of the same images with the metadata gone.

Nothing is uploaded, and your originals are never touched — the cleaned copies come back as a separate ZIP for you to unpack wherever you like.

What gets removed

• EXIF — camera make and model, lens, serial number, exposure settings, and the date and time down to the second
• GPS — latitude, longitude, altitude and sometimes a direction. The single most sensitive thing in a photo
• XMP — editing history, ratings, keywords, copyright fields, and the packets Photoshop and Lightroom leave behind
• IPTC — captions, credits, and the digitalSourceType field that marks an image as AI-generated
• C2PA / Content Credentials — the signed provenance manifest that newer cameras and AI tools attach
• PNG text chunks — where Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI write the full prompt, seed, sampler, model hash and workflow
• Trailing data — some phones append extra data after the end of the JPEG. That goes too

What is deliberately kept

Two things stay by default, because removing them silently damages the picture rather than protecting you.

• Photo orientation. A phone does not rotate the pixels when you turn it sideways — it writes "this image is rotated" into EXIF and lets the viewer do the work. Strip all of EXIF and every portrait photo comes out lying on its side. So a minimal EXIF containing nothing but the orientation tag is written back: one field, no camera, no GPS, no timestamps
• The colour profile (ICC). This says how the colours should be interpreted. Take it off a wide-gamut photo and it renders dull or oversaturated on most screens. It says nothing about you, your camera or your location

Untick either box if you want a truly bare file — the tool will do exactly what you ask.

It is lossless

Stripping metadata here does not re-encode the image. The compressed picture data is copied through byte for byte and only the metadata blocks around it are dropped, so a JPEG that has been through this tool is pixel-identical to the original. You can strip the same folder a hundred times and never lose a scrap of quality.

That is worth knowing because many "remove EXIF" tools quietly decode and re-save the image, which costs a generation of quality every time.

How to use it

• Click Choose a folder of images and pick the folder. Your browser will ask permission to read it
• Check the numbers — the summary tells you how many images were found
• Adjust the options if you want to strip the orientation or colour profile too
• Press Strip metadata, then Get the cleaned images (ZIP)

The report lists every file with how many metadata blocks came off and how much smaller it got. Images that were already clean are marked as such rather than being silently skipped.

What people use it for

• Clearing GPS coordinates out of holiday or family photos before sharing them
• Cleaning a folder of AI-generated images so the prompt, seed and model are not attached
• Removing client and camera details from a photo set before delivery
• Shrinking a folder for the web — metadata can be a surprising share of a small image
• Making sure a batch of screenshots carries no editing history
• Stripping Content Credentials from images before republishing them

Good to know

• Works on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS — it is a web page, so there is nothing to install. It cannot work on iPhone, iPad or Android: mobile browsers have no way to hand a folder to a web page
• Nothing is uploaded. Reading, stripping and zipping all happen in the page — you can watch the network tab
• JPEG, PNG and WebP are supported. Other formats in the folder are left alone rather than mangled
• The ZIP keeps the folder structure, so unpacking it gives you the same layout you started with
• The ZIP is stored rather than compressed — images are already compressed, so deflating them again would cost time and save nothing
• A file your browser cannot open is counted as unreadable and reported, never silently dropped
• Very large folders are capped at 200,000 items so the page cannot freeze

Related tools

• Image Metadata Viewer — inspect and edit one image in detail
• Folder & File List — list what is in the folder first
• Image Compressor — make the images smaller as well as cleaner
• Duplicate File Finder — find identical copies in the same folder