Image Metadata Tools

Both of these tools are genuinely lossless

An image file is not just pixels. It is a container: labelled blocks holding the compressed picture data alongside separate blocks holding metadata — camera details, GPS coordinates, colour profiles, print resolution.

That structure means metadata can be edited without touching the picture at all. Both tools here walk the container, copy the compressed image data across byte for byte, and rewrite only the small blocks around it. The pixels that come out are mathematically identical to the pixels that went in.

Most online tools do not work this way. They decode the whole image and save a new file, which re-compresses every pixel — spending a generation of JPEG quality to delete a few kilobytes of text, or to change a number describing print size.

See what is in your photos before you decide

The EXIF viewer shows you the contents of a file before it removes anything: camera make and model, the exact capture time, editing software, serial numbers, and GPS coordinates with a map link.

That ordering is deliberate. "Remove metadata" is an abstraction most people cannot evaluate. "This photo says it was taken at these coordinates, at this time, on this camera" is something you can act on.

The DPI bug worth knowing about

A JPEG records its print resolution in two independent places: the JFIF header and the EXIF resolution tags. Nearly every online DPI tool writes only the first. Photoshop and Word read the second, find the old value still there, and display it — so the change appears to have silently failed.

The DPI tool here writes both, and inserts a JFIF header if the file lacks one. It also shows the resulting print size in inches and centimetres as you change the value, because DPI on its own tells you very little.