Remove EXIF Metadata in the Browser: How to Verify the Result Byte by Byte

Most "remove EXIF metadata" tools work like this: you upload the photo, their server
strips the tags, they send the copy back. That works, but it means the picture you were
careful about spent time on hardware you do not control.

The OnePassApps Image Studio has a Remove metadata tool that does the job in your
own browser tab. Open it here: the Image Studio

The interesting part is not the button. It is that the result is verifiable. Because
the copy is produced in your tab, you can read the exported bytes yourself and confirm
that the metadata is actually gone — instead of trusting a panel that says "Metadata
removed". Below is exactly how I checked it, with the numbers from the run.

What the tool says it removes

The panel is explicit about the three groups it strips, and it is worth reading before
you rely on it:

• Location — "GPS coordinates"
• Camera — "Camera, lens and software"
• Other — "Dates, comments, thumbnails, profiles"

You also choose the output format (PNG, JPEG or WebP) and a quality percentage — the
slider reads 86 by default and runs from 10 to 100. The action button is labelled
"Create metadata-free copy", which is a fair description of what it does: it draws
the image again and writes a new file, rather than patching the old one in place.

Source formats and limits, as the page states them: JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 25 MiB and
25 megapixels.

The honest caveat first

This is a re-encode, not a surgical edit. The exported copy is rendered from the pixels
of the source, so the result is a new image, and the panel is upfront about the file
sizes: it shows you the before and after numbers side by side so you can keep whichever
copy you prefer. The original file on your disk is never touched. In my run the
re-encoded copy came out smaller than the input — 6.3KiB down to 5.2KiB, "17% smaller"
— but that is a property of my test image, not a promise about yours.

If you need to read metadata rather than strip it, this is the wrong tool. The
operation here is removal, and removal is not forensics.

How to verify it yourself

The check is a few lines of Python. Install Pillow, point it at the file you exported,
and print what the parser finds:

from PIL import Image
from PIL.ExifTags import TAGS

im = Image.open("exported.jpg")
exif = im.getexif()
print("exif entries:", len(exif) if exif else 0)
for tag, value in exif.items():
    print(TAGS.get(tag, tag), "=", value)

gps = exif.get_ifd(0x8825)   # 0x8825 is the GPSInfoIFD pointer tag
print("gps:", gps if gps else "none")

exif entries: 0 and gps: none means the tags are not in the file. That is the
whole test, and it does not require trusting anyone's summary line.

What my run showed

I did not want to check this against a file that had no metadata in the first place, so
I built one that did. Starting from a plain 320 × 200 JPEG generated in the browser, I
inserted a real EXIF APP1 segment by hand, containing:

• an ImageDescription tag holding the marker string ONEPASSPROBE
• a GPSInfo pointer with a GPSLatitude of 51° 30' 00" N

Pillow confirmed the file I was about to upload really carried them:

INPUT  exif entries: 2
       GPSInfo = 51
       ImageDescription = 'ONEPASSPROBE'
       GPS GPSLatitudeRef = N
       GPS GPSLatitude = (51.0, 30.0, 0.0)

Then I dropped that file into the tool's stage and pressed "Create metadata-free copy".
The panel reported: Ready, Before 6.3KiB JPEG, After 5.2KiB JPEG, Dimensions
320 × 200, "Metadata removed in 0.1 s", and a result card reading "JPEG · 320 × 200 ·
5.2 KiB · 17% smaller" with a "Download JPEG" button. It also says "Finished. Download
a new copy; the original stays unchanged."

Then I read the exported bytes back with the same parser:

OUTPUT exif entries: 0

Zero. Not "the GPS is gone but the rest stayed" — the whole EXIF block is absent from
the exported file, the GPS pointer included, and the ONEPASSPROBE marker string is not
in the output either. The output is a genuine 320 × 200 JPEG (magic bytes FF D8 FF),
5,341 bytes against the input's 6,470.

That is the part worth taking away: you do not have to take the panel's word for
it. The file is on your disk, so you can point any EXIF parser at it — exiftool,
Pillow, your phone's file details — and check.

Where the work happens

Nothing is uploaded. The studio page says it plainly: "Nothing leaves this tab." The
stage line under the file reads "Processing stays in this browser." The file is read
from disk with the normal file picker or a drop, drawn in the tab, and written back as
a new file.

The studios are browser-local, so they need no account and use no credits. The Standard
plan is currently free during a promotional period: "Standard is free right now",
$0 / month, 100,000 credits every 30 days, no end date set and no card required, with
no automatic paid subscription.

One more thing to check on your own copy

Whatever the panel reports, the exported file is a re-encode. If you are removing
metadata from the only copy of a photo, make a backup first — and if the picture
matters, look at the exported file before you use it. The tool never overwrites your
original, but a new file is a new file.

If you want the wider list of browser tools — what each one does, what its limits are,
and which ones exist for images, audio, files, text, data, icons and colour — it is in
the app guides: app.onepassapps.com/guides

Disclosure

I work on OnePassApps. Everything above was read off the live studio page and proved by
running the tool on a real file with real EXIF data, in this post's own test — the
numbers and the parser output are from that run, not from a marketing page. You can
repeat the whole check yourself in about a minute.