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Image Optimizer

Strip metadata and redundant markup without touching the picture. Free, and runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.

About Image Optimizer

The obvious way to strip metadata from an image is to draw it onto a canvas and encode it again. That does remove everything — along with some of the picture, because re-encoding a JPEG re-quantises it and every round loses a little more. For a file that is already at the quality it should be, that is a bad trade, and it is the trade most "optimisers" quietly make.

Nothing here is re-encoded. JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP are all containers of labelled blocks with the pixels in one of them, so removing a block that is not the pixels is a matter of copying the file without it. What comes out is byte-for-byte the same image in a smaller file, and it works on something that has already been saved nine times.

What gets removed is worth knowing about on its own. An EXIF block from a phone carries the camera, the lens, the timestamp, the serial number and — unless it was turned off — where the photo was taken, to within a few metres. A Photoshop block can carry the edit history and a thumbnail of an earlier version of the image, which is how detail that was cropped out has been recovered from published photographs more than once.

SVG is treated differently because it is text rather than a container. An SVG out of a drawing program is mostly not drawing instructions: editor namespaces, an RDF metadata block, a comment naming the version, an id on every node, and coordinates to fourteen decimal places because that is what a float prints as. None of it moves a pixel and it is routinely two thirds of the file.

Where it helps

  • Removes metadata without re-encoding, so the pixels are identical and the file can be optimised repeatedly with no loss.
  • Handles JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP and SVG, and says which reader it used.
  • Names every block it removed and what that block held, so you can see what the file was carrying.
  • Marks the blocks that could change how the image looks — colour profiles and gamma — and keeps them unless you say otherwise.
  • Cleans SVG markup properly: editor namespaces, metadata, empty groups, unreferenced ids and coordinate precision.
  • Runs entirely in this tab, which matters for a photograph whose metadata is the reason you are here.

Limits

  • It removes metadata rather than recompressing, so a large photograph at high quality stays a large photograph. The Image Compressor is what re-encodes.
  • HEIC and AVIF are not taken apart here — they are ISO base media containers with a different structure, and a browser cannot rewrite one without re-encoding.
  • Removing a colour profile can shift the colours of a wide-gamut image, which is why it is off by default and marked in the table.
  • SVG coordinate precision is the one setting that changes the geometry; at one or two decimals the change can be visible on a large viewBox.

Frequently asked questions

Does this reduce the file size much?

It depends entirely on what the file was carrying. A phone photograph often sheds tens of kilobytes of EXIF and thumbnails; an SVG out of a drawing program regularly loses more than half its size; a PNG written by a build pipeline may have nothing to remove at all. The result says which it was.

Is the image really unchanged?

For JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP, yes — the pixel data is copied through untouched, so the decoded image is identical byte for byte. The exception is if you let it remove a colour profile, which changes how the same pixels are interpreted, and that is marked in the table.

How is this different from the Image Compressor?

The compressor re-encodes at a lower quality and produces a smaller, slightly different image. This removes the parts of the file that were never the image and produces a smaller, identical one. Use this first; use the compressor when the picture itself still needs to be smaller.

Will it remove the GPS location from my photo?

Yes — that lives in the EXIF block, which is APP1 in a JPEG and the eXIf chunk in a PNG, and both are removed. The table confirms it by name, and the whole thing happens in your browser rather than on a server.

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