Every photo you take carries hidden data — your location, phone model, timestamp, and sometimes your name. See for yourself, and get a clean copy.
Try it on your photoMetadata is the invisible information your phone or camera writes into every photo, alongside the pixels. It can include the exact GPS coordinates the photo was taken at, the make and model of the device, the date and time down to the second, the settings used, the software that edited it, and on some cameras even a hardware serial number that ties every photo you've ever taken to the same device.
Metadata isn't a bug — it has real uses. Camera settings let editing apps reproduce or undo what you did. Timestamps and GPS let your photo library group shots by trip or by date. Copyright and author fields let creators prove a photo is theirs. Orientation tags stop your photo from showing up sideways. None of this is sinister on its own.
The same fields that organise your camera roll also leak your home address, your daily routine and your identity to anyone who gets hold of the file. In 2012, an antivirus mogul on the run was tracked down because a journalist posted a photo of him — the GPS tag in the EXIF showed exactly where he was hiding in Guatemala. In 2014, the former head of the NSA put it bluntly:
"We kill people based on metadata." — Michael Hayden, former NSA & CIA director, 2014
Take one with your phone right now, or pick one from your camera roll. Your photo is processed in a sandboxed environment, never stored, and automatically erased within 15 minutes.
Drop a photo here, or click to browse
JPG · PNG · HEIC · WebP · TIFF — up to 50 MB
