WEBP Geotag Remover

Of everything a photograph can carry, coordinates are the most sensitive by a comfortable margin. A camera model tells someone what you own, a timestamp tells them when, but a latitude and longitude pair tells them where you were, often to within a few metres. Photographs taken at home, at a child’s school, or at a client’s premises leak exactly the kind of detail nobody intends to publish, and they leak it invisibly, because nothing about the image looks different.

That is why checking deserves to be its own step rather than an assumption. Most people believe their files are clean because a social network strips location on upload, but the file on your disk is a different object from the copy a platform stores. The original still has its coordinates, and the original is what gets emailed, dropped into a press kit, attached to a listing or handed to a printer. Running a check takes seconds and replaces a belief with a fact.

The cleaning itself is done properly where the format allows it, which means at the byte level rather than by re-saving. The file is parsed, the location entries inside its metadata structure are zeroed in place, and everything else, including the compressed image data, is left exactly where it was. Nothing is decoded and recompressed, so a photograph emerges from the process with its quality untouched, which is the whole point of treating metadata as a separate concern from the picture.

Each supported container needs its own handling, and this matters more than it might sound. JPEG carries metadata in application segments, PNG carries it in a dedicated chunk, and TIFF stores it in a directory of entries that reference each other. In each case the location values are located within that structure and cleared, and in each case the rest of the file is left alone rather than rewritten around them.

Honesty about scope is the part most tools skip, so here it is plainly. Stripping at the byte level is implemented for JPEG, PNG and TIFF. A WEBP file is scanned and, if coordinates are found in it, the file is reported as unsupported rather than quietly passed through as though it had been cleaned. That distinction is deliberate: a tool that claimed success while leaving coordinates in place would be worse than no tool at all. When a WEBP file genuinely needs every trace of metadata gone, the metadata remover handles it by re-encoding, which drops all metadata rather than only the location.

The reporting is what makes the tool usable on real batches. Every file ends in one of three states: coordinates removed, no location data present, or unsupported for that format. Nothing is silently skipped, and a file that never had coordinates is labelled as such instead of being counted as a success. Whole batches can be collected afterwards in a single archive, and all of it happens in your browser, so the photographs never leave your device.