A JPEG about to be attached to an email. This is an illustration — no real file, name or location is used.
Before — what you would be sending
holiday-01.jpgJPEG
Exact location51.503364, -0.119543
Camera ownerA. Whitfield
Camera serial numberF2LX9K3QW1
Apple · iPhone 15 Pro · 14 Aug 2026, 19:42
After cleaning
holiday-01-clean.jpgJPEG
Exact locationremoved
Camera ownerremoved
Camera serial numberremoved
Every pixel identical. Nothing is re-compressed, so there is no quality loss.
What gets removed
The EXIF block, which holds GPS, camera, lens and owner information. Any XMP block written by an editor. The Photoshop IPTC record. Free-text comment segments. The embedded preview thumbnail, which can otherwise show a pre-crop version of the image.
What stays
The image itself, byte for byte. A JPEG is a sequence of labelled segments, and the compressed picture data is one of them. Removing the others does not touch it, so there is no re-encoding and no quality loss of any kind.
Why not just re-save it
Re-saving through an image editor does strip metadata, but it also re-compresses the picture and loses a little quality each time. Removing the segments directly avoids that entirely.
In practice
What the segments actually are
A JPEG is a series of blocks, each introduced by a two-byte marker. The picture data sits in one block that begins with the marker FFDA and runs to the end of the file. Metadata occupies separate blocks earlier on: FFE1 for EXIF and XMP, FFED for the Photoshop record, FFFE for comments. Removing metadata means copying the file while skipping those blocks. The picture data is never decoded, never re-encoded and never touched, which is why the result is byte-identical in the part that matters.
Why re-saving is worse than stripping
Opening a JPEG in an editor and saving it again does remove metadata, but it also decodes the image and compresses it a second time. JPEG compression is lossy, so each generation loses a little detail, most visibly around sharp edges and text. Do it a few times and the degradation becomes obvious. Stripping the segments avoids the question entirely: nothing is recompressed because nothing is decoded.
Doing it in bulk on your own machine
For a folder rather than a file, exiftool is the right tool. The command exiftool -all= *.jpg strips metadata from every JPEG in the current directory and keeps the originals as .jpg_original backups. Add -overwrite_original once you trust it. It runs locally, handles thousands of files, and is the standard answer for anyone doing this regularly.
Common questions
Does removing EXIF reduce JPEG quality?
No. The picture data is left untouched and never re-compressed.
Does this remove the GPS location?
Yes. GPS tags are part of the EXIF block that gets removed.
Can I do this in bulk?
This page handles one file at a time. For bulk work on your own machine, the exiftool command line utility is the standard choice.