Every photo, PDF and video you share carries a second, smaller file inside it — a block of hidden text describing where the file came from. A metadata remover strips that block out before the file leaves your hands. ScanMetadata is a free metadata viewer and metadata remover that does the whole job inside your browser tab: your file is read by JavaScript running on your own machine, it is never uploaded to a server, and we never see it. This page explains what that hidden data is, what it gives away, and how to get rid of it.
Metadata meaning and definition: data about your data.
The simplest metadata definition is the one archivists have used for decades — metadata is data about data. It is not the picture, the paragraph or the sound; it is the description attached to them. A photo's metadata records the camera that took it, the lens, the shutter speed and often the exact coordinates of the spot you stood on. A word processor document records who wrote it and who saved it last. An MP4 records the encoder, the resolution and the date. The meaning is always the same: information about the file, travelling silently inside the file.
What is EXIF data?
EXIF — Exchangeable Image File Format — is the metadata standard that digital cameras and phones write into JPEG, TIFF and HEIC photos. EXIF data holds the make and model of the camera, the lens, the ISO, the aperture, the shutter speed, the orientation, the software that last edited the image and the timestamp of the shot. If location services were switched on, it also holds GPS latitude and longitude accurate to a few metres. An EXIF data viewer simply decodes those tags and shows them to you: nothing about them is encrypted or deliberately concealed, only invisible in an ordinary image viewer.
EXIF is not the only standard inside a photo. IPTC carries the captions, credits and copyright lines news agencies rely on. XMP is Adobe's XML packet, written by Lightroom and Photoshop. ICC describes the colour profile, and a camera's maker note holds tags nobody outside the manufacturer has documented. This site's image metadata viewer reads all of them and lists every tag it decodes rather than a curated handful, so what you see on screen is what is actually in the bytes.
Why remove EXIF data before you share a file?
A photo posted straight off a phone can name the street it was taken on. That is the headline risk, and it is not hypothetical — GPS tags in shared images have exposed home addresses, unannounced locations and daily routines. The quieter risks matter too. Camera serial numbers link every photo from one device together. Timestamps contradict a story. Editing-software tags reveal that an image was retouched, and document metadata names the colleague who saved the file last. Removing EXIF data changes nothing about how the picture looks; it removes the paperwork stapled to the back of it.
How to remove metadata from an image
Open the metadata remover, drop a JPEG, PNG or WebP file onto the page, read the list of fields the tool found, and download the cleaned copy. There is no upload step and no queue, because there is no server in the loop: the file is parsed and rewritten by code running in the tab you already have open. Your original file is never modified — the stripped version arrives as a separate download, so you keep both and can compare them.
Removal here is lossless. The compressed image data is copied through byte for byte and only the metadata segments are dropped, so the picture is never re-encoded and loses no quality. That is also why the image metadata remover accepts JPEG, PNG and WebP specifically: those are the three containers that can honestly be rewritten that way. A PDF takes a different route — the PDF metadata remover rebuilds the document from its object graph and leaves out everything the file no longer references, so what you remove is gone from the bytes rather than merely hidden from the viewer.
Beyond photos: PDF, video, audio and document metadata
Images are only the most familiar case. A PDF carries a document information dictionary and often an XMP packet naming its author, the software that produced it and the date it was written, and it can carry file attachments, JavaScript actions and annotations besides. The PDF metadata viewer reads all of that and exports the report as JSON or CSV; the asset remover lists what a document holds beyond its printed page and writes a clean copy without the parts you tick.
Video and audio carry their own. An MP4 or MOV container records duration, bitrate, resolution, codec, rotation and the creation dates the recorder stamped in. MP3 and FLAC files carry ID3 tags with artist, album and cover art. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, EPUB and OpenDocument files record their author, their last editor and their total editing time. The metadata viewer reads every one of those. Video metadata is read here and not rewritten: removing metadata from a video means re-muxing the container, which is a different job from the lossless copy the image tools perform, and this site says so rather than offering a button that quietly does less than it claims.
A metadata remover that never uploads your file
Most online metadata tools work by sending your file to a server, running a command-line utility on it and sending a result back. That means handing a stranger's machine the very file you were worried about — including the coordinates you opened the tool to delete. ScanMetadata inverts the arrangement: every parser, the EXIF writer and the PDF rewriter are JavaScript running in your browser, and there is no upload endpoint to send anything to. The practical effects are that file size is limited only by your own device, the tools keep working with no connection once the page is cached, and no account, credit card or usage cap stands between you and the result.