Guide · Android
How to remove metadata from Android photos
Android is not one camera app but many. Here is what they have in common, where the differences bite, and how to remove metadata regardless of which phone took the picture.
What Android phones store in a photo
The EXIF block written by an Android camera looks much like any other: manufacturer and model, lens and focal length, ISO, shutter speed and aperture, the capture timestamp, the orientation, and the software that produced the file.
Where Android differs is the spread. Manufacturers ship their own camera apps on top of the platform, so exactly which extra fields appear — scene modes, HDR markers, vendor-specific notes — varies by brand and by model. What is consistent is the part that matters for privacy: if location was permitted, coordinates are in the file.
Why the gallery's location toggle is not the whole answer
Gallery apps commonly offer an option to leave location out when sharing. It is genuinely useful, and it is also narrower than it looks.
It applies to that share action, in that app. Send the same file a different way — a different messenger, an attachment, a cloud sync, a USB copy to a computer — and the original with its full metadata is what moves. The toggle also addresses location specifically, while the capture time and the device model stay behind and are quite identifying on their own.
Removing the metadata from the file itself is the version that holds no matter how the photo travels afterwards.
Removing it in the browser
Open the EXIF cleaner on the phone or on a computer, add the image, and download the result. Processing happens in the browser on your own device, so nothing is uploaded and there is no app to install — which also means it works the same on any Android version or manufacturer skin.
The image itself is not re-encoded: resolution and visible quality are unchanged, and only the hidden fields are dropped.
To confirm, put the original and the cleaned copy side by side in the EXIF comparison and look at which rows disappeared.