EXIF remover: KillEXIF, exif.es and exifremover.com, compared and tested

How we measured it

We prepared six files with made-up but recognisable metadata: two JPEG photos and one HEIC with GPS coordinates, phone model and serial number; a MOV video with a location; a PDF and a Word file with author and company.

We opened each site in an automated browser, logged every network request the page made, cleaned each file, downloaded it and analysed it with exiftool, a tool unrelated to all three. To find out whether anything was re-encoded, we compared the image and video data with the original’s, byte for byte.

What they do the same, and well

It is fair to start here, because on the essentials all three deliver:

• None uploaded the files. All three process in the browser, and on none did we see a request leave with the file in it.
• All three removed the sensitive data from what they accept: GPS, model, serial number, date, author and title.
• None re-encodes. On all three, the data of the JPEG photos and of the video came out byte-for-byte identical to the original: the metadata goes and the image is untouched.

Where they differ

• Who guarantees nothing is uploaded. killexif.com and exif.es declare connect-src 'none': the browser forbids them from making any connection, so they could not upload a file even if they wanted to, and anyone can check it in the page’s code. exifremover.com declares no such policy. Not uploading your files is its own choice, which the browser does not enforce; in our test, it did not upload them.
• Ads and third parties. While we were cleaning, the exifremover.com page talked to five domains besides its own: Google ads, its consent manager, statistics on another server and Google fonts. killexif.com and exif.es only talked to their own, with no ads or cookies.
• Formats. exifremover.com accepts JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, GIF, AVIF, MP4, MOV and PDF; it did not take the test Word file. killexif.com and exif.es also accept TIFF, audio (MP3, FLAC, WAV, M4A, Ogg and Opus), AVI, MKV and WebM video, Office and OpenDocument files, and ZIP.
• Limits. According to its own page, exifremover.com takes up to 20 files of 50 MB. killexif.com and exif.es set no number of files and go up to 2 GB per file, which is where the browser starts running out of memory.
• Checking the result. killexif.com and exif.es read each cleaned file back and say so: “Checked: nothing sensitive left”, or what survived. We found nothing on the exifremover.com page saying it checks the result.
• A detail from the test. The MOV video cleaned on exifremover.com downloaded with a .heic extension, although inside it was a proper MOV. Double-click it and your system may not recognise it.
• Languages. exifremover.com is in 17 languages, killexif.com in 15 and exif.es in Spanish and English.

killexif.com and exif.es: the same tool

exif.es uses the same engine as killexif.com: in the test they returned exactly the same file. It is our tool with its own home in Spanish, made for people searching in Spanish. Choosing one or the other is a matter of taste.

What only KillEXIF has: the Mac and Windows app

All three sites work for the files in front of you. For everyday use, KillEXIF also has a desktop app on the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store, with the same engine and the same rules: cleaning from Finder or File Explorer without opening anything, watched folders that clean whatever lands in them, batches of thousands of files and no size ceiling. It is free to download; the paid part is bought inside, as a one-off purchase or a yearly subscription.

So, which one?

If you clean a photo now and then, all three do it well. If you want the no-upload guarantee enforced by the browser rather than depending on anyone, and no ads around it, killexif.com, or exif.es if you prefer it in Spanish. If you work with documents, audio or many files, KillEXIF. And if you do it every day, the app.

Measured on 24 September 2026. Sites change: if any of this stops being true, we will correct it here with its date.