A photo metadata remover strips the trail a generator leaves behind — the prompt, the model name, the seed, the job ID, and, for some tools, a signed provenance manifest. That trail is metadata, not pixels. Which means you can erase it completely without redrawing a single pixel of your image.
This page is the full briefing: which trails get removed, which are deliberately left alone, and the one case where a clean takes more than the AI fields with it.
The tool runs entirely in your browser. Drop the file in, read the report, decide, clean, verify. Nothing is uploaded, no copy of your photo is kept anywhere, and no step waits on a server.
What AI metadata actually is — and where it hides
Five carriers carry the trail, and every format stores them differently:
- C2PA Content Credentials — a signed manifest in an APP11 marker (JPEG), a
c2pachunk (PNG) or ac2pachunk (WebP). It names the issuer and the actions recorded. - XMP — an XML packet holding the generator's name, the prompt, the model, the seed. In JPEG it is an APP1 marker; in PNG and WebP it is an
XMPchunk. - EXIF — a TIFF-style tag dictionary. The
Softwaretag (0x0131) is free text, and the generator writes its name there. - IPTC — the Photoshop APP13 block, which holds the caption, by-line, credit and copyright.
- PNG text chunks and the JPEG comment — smaller carriers, used by Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI and Midjourney to leave a prompt or a workflow hash.
Nine generators are matched by name in the rules this tool runs: Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, DALL·E, Stable Diffusion (Automatic1111 / SD.Next / stable-diffusion-webui), FLUX (Black Forest Labs), Canva, ComfyUI, Leonardo and Ideogram. Any file made by one of them carries a matched name in one of the carriers above — and that matched name is the only trigger the cleaner needs.
How to remove AI metadata from a photo
- Drop the file. Drag a JPEG, PNG or WebP into the drop zone on the tool, or click to browse. The file is read in your browser through the File API — no request is made with its contents.
- Read the report. The scanner names every AI trace it finds, which carrier holds it, and which generator wrote it. Nothing is removed yet.
- Clean. One click drops the metadata segments that name a generator and writes a new file. The pixel data and the ICC colour profile are byte-identical to the source.
- Verify. The cleaned file is re-scanned and you get a proof: what was removed, the byte count, and zero AI fields remaining.
Have a whole folder to get through? Drop them all at once — the batch remove AI metadata from a folder guide covers what changes when the queue is more than one file.
What a photo metadata remover strips, and what it keeps
The whole tool runs on one rule: a metadata segment is dropped only when its own bytes name an AI generator. That is a per-segment decision, not a per-field edit — and it is the entire difference between this and a tool that re-saves your file.
C2PA Content Credential — dropped whenever a credential, a signed action or a manifest UUID is present. Nothing else goes with it.
XMP — dropped when it declares an Adobe AI namespace, names a generator in xmp:CreatorTool, carries the MidjourneyBot actor id, uses an mj:prompt namespace, carries a UUIDv4-shaped xmpMM:DocumentID, records a photoshop:Generated history action, or declares an IPTC AI source type (trainedAlgorithmicMedia, compositeWithTrainedAlgorithmicMedia, compositeSynthetic, AISystemUsed and the other IPTC 2025.1 AI fields). The whole XMP packet goes, including dc:creator, xmp:CreatorTool and xmp:CreateDate.
EXIF — dropped when its own bytes name a generator: Midjourney, Canva, ComfyUI, DALL·E, Adobe Firefly, Black Forest Labs (FLUX), Leonardo, Ideogram, Automatic1111 / stable-diffusion, or when the block contains the string AI. GPS coordinates, camera body, lens, exposure and copyright live in the same block and go with it. A camera photo whose EXIF says "NIKON Z 9" is not AI provenance, so its block is left alone.
IPTC — dropped when the standalone word ai appears anywhere in the Photoshop block, or when the block names Midjourney. The whole APP13 is one segment, so caption, by-line, creator and copyright go with it.
PNG text chunks — PNG only. Dropped one chunk at a time when its keyword is prompt, workflow or parameters — the three keywords Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI and A1111 write their generation record under. The value is not inspected: one of those keywords is enough. A Comment chunk naming Canva, DALL·E or Leonardo goes too.
JPEG comment — JPEG only. Dropped when it names Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI, Midjourney, Firefly, DALL·E, Leonardo, Ideogram or Flux.
ICC colour profile — never dropped, in any format. This is the one unconditional promise on this page: your print-ready colour profile survives.
Two format notes, because the carriers are not interchangeable. WebP stores its metadata as RIFF chunks, so the C2PA, XMP and EXIF rules all apply to a WebP file — but WebP has no PNG text chunks and no JPEG comment, so those two rules never fire on one. And the EXIF and XMP chunks in WebP carry the same weights as their JPEG equivalents: the whole block goes, including anything else stored beside it.
Photo or image? Which one you have
The two words overlap, and the difference decides what you lose when you clean.
An image is the generic word. It covers a screenshot, a render, a scan of a document, an AI generation, a meme — anything with pixels and, sometimes, metadata.
A photo implies a camera. Something a sensor captured, with the camera's own EXIF as a by-product: GPS coordinates, camera body, lens, exposure, and often the copyright line.
The overlap is where it gets interesting. An AI edit of a photo is both, and it is exactly the case where a clean costs you something: the camera's EXIF block and the generator's name live in the same block, so a cleaner that works at segment granularity cannot remove one without the other. A cleaner that works at field granularity could keep your GPS — but that is a different tool, and it means re-saving the file.
This is the canonical definition for the site. The remove, clean, delete or strip AI metadata hub covers all of those verbs, and what cleaning keeps and what it drops covers the photographer's side of the same decision.
Remove AI metadata from a phone photo
Phone photos need one warning before anything else: an iPhone stores HEIC by default, and HEIC can be scanned but not cleaned. Apple's container interleaves the metadata boxes with the pixel stream, so the scanner will tell you exactly what is inside your HEIC file, but the cleaner cannot rewrite it. Convert to JPEG first — on iPhone that is Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible, or share the photo and save the JPEG version. Most Android camera apps write JPEG already; some newer ones write HEIF, which has the same limitation.
The other thing worth knowing before you publish: the file you upload is rarely the file that gets served. Every platform re-encodes what you give it, so a clean you do at the source is the only clean that reaches the platform as clean.
If the AI trace is showing up on a post rather than in a file, the trigger is often a cover image or a thumbnail — a separate JPEG or PNG from the media itself. That file carries the same metadata as any other, and the Instagram AI Info guide covers what those labels actually read.
Frequently asked questions
Does removing AI metadata from a photo reduce its quality?
No. The cleaner walks the file at the byte level and rewrites only the metadata segments it decides to drop. The pixel data comes through byte-identical, and the ICC colour profile is never dropped. Tools that "clean" by re-saving the file re-encode the image, which drifts the pixels and can change the color rendering — that difference is covered here.
Will removing AI metadata also remove my GPS coordinates?
Sometimes, and the honest answer is more useful than a blanket "no". GPS lives in the same EXIF block as the Software tag, and this cleaner drops the whole block when that block names an AI generator. If your EXIF says "NIKON Z 9", the block is not AI provenance, so it stays and your coordinates stay with it. If it says "Midjourney", the block goes and the coordinates go with it — the cleaner works at segment granularity and cannot separate them. There is no GPS-only mode. To strip GPS specifically, run exiftool -gps:all= photo.jpg before the file reaches a generator.
Does it remove my copyright, caption and by-line?
It depends which block holds them, and the report tells you before anything is removed. If your caption and by-line sit in the IPTC block and that block contains the standalone word AI anywhere, the whole block goes — caption, by-line, creator and copyright with it. XMP behaves the same way and carries dc:creator. The ICC colour profile is the one thing never removed. Read the report first: it names the block it is about to drop.
Is my photo uploaded to a server?
No. Both the scan and the clean run in your browser. The file is read through the File API and never leaves your device — open the network tab in DevTools while you use the tool and you will see no request carrying it. The free tier covers 10 scans a day without an account.
Can I undo the removal?
No, and you do not need to. The cleaner produces a new file for you to download; the original on your disk is never modified. Keep the original if you want to compare the two or clean again with different settings.
Which photo formats are supported?
JPEG, PNG and WebP can be scanned and cleaned. HEIC can be scanned but not cleaned — the scanner reports what is inside, the cleaner cannot rewrite it, because Apple's container interleaves the metadata boxes with the pixel stream. Convert to JPEG first. Video is a separate tool: the video metadata remover handles MP4 and MOV.
Related reading
- batch remove AI metadata from a folder — the single-file and batch workflow, step by step.
- What cleaning keeps and what it drops — the photographer's side: camera EXIF, GPS and the cases where they go.
- How to remove AI EXIF data from a JPEG — the EXIF deep dive, field by field.
- How to remove a C2PA Content Credential — what a signed manifest is, and what removing it breaks.
- Rip prompt metadata out of an image before you publish — the prompt-leak workflow for Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.
- Does removing metadata reduce image quality? — byte-level walk versus re-save.
- Remove, clean, delete or strip? — the verb hub: what the six words mean here.
Clean your first photo
Drop your photo into the free AI metadata scanner. The report comes first — you will see exactly which fields are there before anything is removed, so you always know what you are giving up and what you are keeping.