ExifTool is the reference implementation for reading and writing metadata: forty years of camera quirks in one Perl library, thousands of tags, every format that has ever stored a date. This site is a browser tool with a narrower job — show a person what a file reveals, then remove it. If you are comfortable in a shell, ExifTool still does more.
Short answer
For a script, a batch of ten thousand files, or a maker-note field nobody else parses, use ExifTool. For one file you are about to send someone, a browser tool with a readable report is faster than installing anything.
Open the metadata removerExifTool is one of the few tools worth recommending over your own product. The comparison is about fit, not quality.
Canon, Nikon, Sony and Apple write private tag ranges with focus distance, shutter count and correction data. ExifTool decodes them; this site removes them without listing them, and the report says so rather than pretending the list is complete.
Ten thousand product photos, a nightly ingest pipeline, a pre-commit hook: that is ExifTool territory. Doing it one file at a time in a browser is not a workflow.
HEIC, AVIF, camera RAW, AIFF, OGG and the legacy Office binaries are all in scope for ExifTool. They are on the roadmap here, not shipped.
ExifTool is a command-line program. Most people who need to remove a location from one photo are not going to install anything, and an online wrapper usually means uploading the file. A browser tab is the shortest path that keeps the file local.
A wall of tag names does not tell you that GPSLatitude is the field that reveals your flat. This site groups fields, shows the raw value, and marks which ones identify a person or a place — the difference between a dump and an explanation.
Checking Content Credentials normally means a second tool and a trust list. Here the manifest is read, the signature and asset hash are checked, and the certificate chain is matched against the C2PA trust list — all in the same page.
ExifTool will happily rewrite a signed PDF or a signed Office package, and the signature stops validating. This site refuses those files and explains why, which is the behaviour a non-specialist needs.
No. The parsers are written for this site: a TIFF/EXIF reader, an XMP/IPTC scanner, PNG chunk and MP4 box walkers, a ZIP-based Office adapter, a pdf-lib based PDF adapter and audio tag readers. ExifTool is not shipped, bundled or called.
For the formats it supports, yes: the metadata segments are removed and the media data is copied unchanged. It will not decode maker notes or handle formats it does not support, and it does not batch.
Most wrappers run the binary on a server, which means uploading the file. If you are removing metadata precisely because the file is sensitive, that defeats the purpose. Running ExifTool locally avoids it too — if you have a terminal.
Whatever is faster for you. If ExifTool is already installed, `exiftool -all= photo.jpg` is one line. If it is not, this page will not make you install a Perl library to strip a GPS tag.