Pixwright: see what’s hidden in your photos, then strip it out
Here’s something that took me an embarrassingly long time to really sit with: almost every photo on your phone is carrying a second, invisible photo underneath it. Not the picture, the data about the picture. The exact time you took it. The camera and the settings. And, very often, the precise GPS coordinates of where you were standing when you pressed the button.
Which means when you post a quick snapshot of something you’re selling, or text a photo from your couch, you can quietly be handing over the location of your home. That bothered me enough that I built a little tool to do something about it. It’s called Pixwright, and it lives here:
First, it shows you what’s actually in there
Drop a photo onto the page and Pixwright reads the hidden data and lays it out in plain language: the date, the camera, the lens and exposure settings, and, if it’s there, the GPS location, with a link so you can see exactly what spot it’s pointing at. No guessing. You see what a stranger would see.
Then, one click, and it strips it. The method is surgical: your image stays pixel-for-pixel identical, and only the hidden data is removed. When it’s done you get a little verified-clean badge, so you’re not just trusting me: the tool checks its own work.
But it turned into a whole little workbench
Once I had photos open in the browser anyway, it felt silly not to let you actually do things with them. So Pixwright also lets you:
- Resize and convert: JPEG, PNG, WebP, or squeeze a photo down to hit a target file size (handy when a form says “under 2 MB”).
- Crop, rotate, and flip without firing up anything heavier.
- Redact: pixelate, blur, or drop a black bar over a face, a license plate, an address, a screen.
- Pull a color palette out of any image, with an eyedropper for grabbing an exact color.
- Batch a whole pile of photos: strip them all at once and download them as a single ZIP.
The part that matters most: nothing leaves your computer
This is the whole point, so I want to be clear about it. Your photos are never uploaded. There’s no server doing the work, no account, no “free tier,” nothing phoning home. Pixwright reads and rewrites the image right there on the page, in your browser, and that’s the end of it. You can watch your network connection while you use it and see it sit perfectly still.
That design choice is exactly because of what this tool is for. The last thing you’d want is to upload the photo with your home coordinates in it to some random website just to get those coordinates removed. So it doesn’t work that way. The code is all first-party, mine, sitting on my own site.
A couple of honest notes
It works on the common formats: JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF. Very large batches lean on your device’s memory, since it’s all happening locally, so if you throw a hundred huge raw photos at it at once, be a little patient. And stripping metadata is about privacy and tidiness; it isn’t a magic anonymizer, so use good judgment with anything truly sensitive.
Mostly, though, I just wanted a clean, private place to look inside a photo and fix it, without trusting a stranger’s server to do it. If that sounds useful to you too, it’s right here and it’s free:
Jamie
