Metadata Cleaner

Clean, strip, remove: the same operation

Cleaner, remover, stripper and eraser all describe the same job — deleting the records attached to a file. The word matters less than what the tool actually does with them, and there are two meaningfully different approaches.

A re-encoding cleaner redraws the image and saves a new file. Metadata disappears, but so does some image quality, and the file is now a generation-two copy. A container-level cleaner, which is what this is, edits the file's structure and leaves the compressed image data alone. The result is a clean file that is otherwise identical to what you started with.

What gets cleaned, block by block

Cleaning is decided per block, not per field, because that is how the data is physically stored. The tool lists each block it found, its size in bytes, and whether it was removed or kept.

• Removed: EXIF, XMP, IPTC/Photoshop resources, JPEG comments, vendor APPn blocks, PNG text and timestamp chunks, C2PA content credentials
• Kept by default: the ICC colour profile, because dropping it can shift colours — with a toggle to remove it anyway
• Kept when relevant: the EXIF orientation flag for rotated photos, re-written on its own so nothing else survives with it

Cleaning AI-generated images

Images from Stable Diffusion interfaces such as Automatic1111, ComfyUI and Forge usually store the full generation record inside the PNG as text: the prompt, the negative prompt, the seed, sampler, CFG scale, steps and model hash. Tools built on the Content Authenticity Initiative, including Adobe Firefly and recent Photoshop versions, embed C2PA content credentials instead.

Both are metadata, and both are cleaned here. What no metadata cleaner can touch is a watermark encoded into the pixels themselves, such as SynthID — that is not metadata, and any tool claiming to remove it is overstating what it does.