How this strips metadata
Photos often carry hidden EXIF metadata - camera details, timestamps, and sometimes GPS coordinates showing exactly where a photo was taken. This tool redraws your image onto a blank canvas and re-exports it: since the canvas only copies pixel data and never carries metadata through, the re-exported file comes out completely clean. Everything happens locally in your browser - your original image is never uploaded anywhere.
Why redrawing onto a canvas removes metadata so reliably
A canvas element only ever holds pixel color values - there's no mechanism for metadata like camera model, timestamp, or GPS coordinates to travel along with the image data into the canvas in the first place. Exporting straight from the canvas therefore produces a file with no metadata by construction, rather than by scanning for and deleting specific metadata fields, which is a more reliable approach than trying to strip known metadata types one by one.
Why GPS coordinates in photo metadata are a genuine privacy concern
Many phone cameras tag photos with the exact location they were taken by default - sharing that photo online without stripping that data can reveal where you live, work, or frequently visit, even if the photo itself shows nothing sensitive. This is one of the more consequential pieces of metadata this tool removes, beyond the camera and timestamp details that matter less for privacy.
Why JPEG and PNG are handled with different re-export settings
JPEG is a lossy format that re-encodes at a quality setting, while PNG is lossless by design - re-exporting a JPEG at 95% quality keeps visual loss minimal while still fully clearing metadata, and re-exporting a PNG losslessly means no quality is sacrificed at all, so each format gets the re-export approach that suits how it actually stores image data.