PRIVACY GUIDE · HOW CLEANING WORKS
How to remove photo metadata without losing quality
Opening a JPEG in an editor and saving it again usually strips some metadata, but it also compresses the image a second time. Each re-save can lose a little more detail. There’s a way to remove the metadata while leaving the picture itself untouched.
Why re-saving costs quality
JPEG compression throws away detail the eye is unlikely to miss. Editing apps decode the image to pixels, then encode it again when you save. That second encoding discards a little more detail, even at a high quality setting. It’s small once, but it adds up, and the new file isn’t the one your camera produced.
A JPEG is a series of labelled blocks.
Inside the file, each block starts with a two-byte marker that says what it holds. The compressed picture lives in its own blocks, separate from the metadata. That means metadata blocks can be dropped without decoding or re-encoding the image.
| Marker | What it holds | In a cleaned copy |
|---|---|---|
| SOI · FFD8 | Start of image | Kept |
| APP0 · FFE0 | JFIF header | Kept, normalized |
| APP1 · FFE1 | EXIF (including GPS) and XMP | Removed (a minimal orientation tag is kept when needed) |
| APP2 · FFE2 | ICC colour profile | Your choice; kept by default |
| APP13 · FFED | Photoshop and IPTC information | Removed |
| APP14 · FFEE | Adobe colour-transform flag | Kept when present; it affects how colours decode |
| Other APPn | Maker and app-specific data | Removed |
| COM · FFFE | Comments | Removed |
| DQT, SOF, DHT, SOS | Quantization tables, frame header, Huffman tables and the compressed image data | Kept exactly, byte for byte |
| EOI · FFD9 | End of image (anything after it is dropped) | Kept |
What “without recompression” means here
Photo Privacy Check copies the image blocks across exactly as they are and leaves out the metadata blocks. The compressed image data in the cleaned copy is byte-for-byte the same as in the original. Because nothing is re-encoded, there is no generation loss, and the file usually gets slightly smaller.
Two small things are kept on purpose. Many phone photos are stored sideways with an orientation tag that tells viewers to rotate them, so a minimal tag stays to keep the photo the right way up. An Adobe colour-transform flag also stays when present, because removing it can change how the colours decode.
Check the copy, not just the process.
After cleaning, the tool reads each new copy again and reports what remains. You can also select a downloaded copy later to inspect it. Your originals are never changed.
Limits
- JPEG only. PNG, WebP, HEIC and video files are rejected rather than half-cleaned. Convert a HEIC photo to JPEG first if you need to clean it here.
- Unusual or damaged files. Uncommon JPEG encodings and structurally damaged EXIF are rejected.
- Batch size. Up to 20 photos, 20 MB each and 25 megapixels per image.
- Not an anonymity guarantee. Visible details, filenames and file-system dates are outside its scope.
Clean a photo
Add up to 20 JPEGs, review what each contains, and download cleaned copies in a ZIP. Everything happens in your browser.
Clean photo metadataIndependent guide by Tidy. Describes the tool as of 19 October 2026. Related: what photo metadata reveals.