Your photo knows where you live

Removing photo metadata means stripping exactly this kind of hidden data before you ever hit share. Take a picture in your kitchen, list a sofa for sale, and the photo you upload can carry the exact coordinates of the room you stood in — accurate to a few metres. It is not visible anywhere. It is stored beside the image, and anyone who saves that file can read it in two clicks.

Alongside it sits your camera's serial number, which links every photo you have ever posted back to the same device; the date and time to the second; the software you edited with; your name, if your camera was ever set up with it; and often a small embedded copy of the picture before you cropped it.

MiniPNG removes all of it — without ever opening the image.

Why "without opening the image" is the whole point

Most tools that strip metadata decode your photo and save it again. That works, and it quietly costs you a generation of JPEG compression every time: edges soften, gradients band, and the file is never quite what it was.

This one never decodes anything. A JPEG is a chain of labelled blocks and the identifying data sits in blocks before the picture starts, so those blocks are cut out and the compressed image is copied across untouched. Same dimensions, same detail, same file — minus what it knew about you.

Compare the before and after in any viewer: the pixels are identical.

Your portrait photos will not come back sideways

This is the single most common complaint about metadata removers, and it has a real cause. When you turn your phone, it does not rotate the picture — it stores a small note saying "display this rotated 90°." That note is metadata. Strip it without thinking, and every portrait photo in your album lands on its side.

Here, the rotation is applied to the picture itself first, losslessly, so the photo no longer needs a note to look right. Upload an album of holiday shots and every one comes back the way you took it.

Your colours will not shift

Modern phones shoot in Display P3, a wider range of colour than the old web standard, and they attach a small profile explaining how to read it. Remove that profile along with everything else and nothing is converted — the same numbers are simply misread as sRGB. Skin turns red, skies turn electric, and the photo looks worse in a way that is hard to name.

That profile is colour information, not personal information, so it is kept.

Every file is checked before you get it

After cleaning, each photo is re-read and searched for location, camera make and model, serial number, author, copyright, XMP, IPTC, comments, software and original dates. If anything survived, that file is reported as failed rather than handed to you.

A privacy tool that is wrong is worse than one that says no — because you act on the belief that the file is safe to publish.

Supported formats

The format is detected from the file's actual content, not its name — so a photo saved with the wrong extension is still cleaned correctly and comes back with the right one.

What is removed

• GPS coordinates and every location field
• Camera make, model, lens and serial number
• Date and time the photo was taken
• Author, copyright, contact details and captions
• Editing software and its version
• Embedded thumbnails, which on a cropped photo can still show what you cropped out
• Comments, ratings and custom tags

What is kept

• The picture itself, pixel for pixel — nothing is re-compressed
• The colour profile, so nothing shifts
• The correct orientation
• The file's own name

What's next?

Cleaning documents too? Remove PDF Metadata strips the same kind of hidden data from PDFs, including any photos embedded inside them. Shooting on an iPhone? HEIC to JPG converts your photos first if you need a more universal format. Once your photos are clean, Compress JPG can shrink them for faster uploads.