Image metadata

Good to know

• The block is a small TIFF file living inside the picture: a byte-order mark, a directory of entries, and offsets counted from the start of that block. JPEG keeps it behind a marker, PNG and WebP in a chunk of their own.
• Coordinates are the reason to look. A phone writes them by default, they survive every copy and forward, and six decimal places is a house rather than a district. They are shown here rather than linked to a map, because opening a map would hand them to someone else.
• "Download without metadata" keeps nothing; the list above keeps whatever you tick. Either way the file is rewritten without those blocks rather than re-encoded, and the compressed picture is copied through byte for byte — the image is identical, and only what was written about it changes.
• Exif is not the only place things hide. A file can also carry an XMP packet, an IPTC block or a plain comment, each with names, captions and sometimes coordinates of its own. Every one of them is listed with its size, and the ones that are whole files in their own right — the Exif block, the XMP, an ICC profile, the video — can be saved separately.
• Tag names are the ones the specification gives them, left in English on purpose: they are identifiers, and translating them would make them impossible to look up. Everything happens in your browser — the photo is not uploaded anywhere.
• Removing the metadata also removes the orientation tag, so a photo taken sideways will display sideways afterwards — nothing rotated it, the note telling viewers to is simply gone. If that matters, run it through the resize page instead: re-encoding turns the pixels themselves and carries no metadata either way.
• Some phones attach a short video to a still — Samsung and Android both call it a Motion Photo. The clip is not metadata: it is a whole MP4 appended after the end of the picture, and the metadata holds only a flag and a length saying it is there. It is listed above with its size, and removing the metadata removes it too. That is the point — a file cleaned of its coordinates that still carries three seconds of video and sound is not clean.