How to Remove EXIF Data in Windows 11 and 10

The Details tab in a file's Properties dialog is the same in Windows 10 and Windows 11. In Windows 11 the classic dialog opens straight from the right-click menu — you do not need Show more options. Keyboard shortcut: Alt + Enter on a selected file.

The two options it offers:

• Create a copy with all possible properties removed. Leaves your original untouched and writes a cleaned file next to it, named photo - Copy.jpg. This is the safe default — but remember the original, with its GPS still intact, is now sitting in the same folder. Do not upload the wrong one.
• Remove the following properties from this file. Edits the file in place and lets you tick individual fields, so you can drop GPS latitude and longitude while keeping the camera model and exposure settings.

It handles batches, too:

Select any number of photos in Explorer (Ctrl+click, or Ctrl+A for the folder), then right-click → Properties → Details → Remove Properties and Personal Information. Windows applies the same removal to every file you selected. For a few dozen holiday photos this is genuinely faster than installing anything — and our guide to batch removing EXIF data compares it with the Mac and browser equivalents.

It does not re-encode the image. Unlike tools that decode and re-save the JPEG, Windows edits the metadata bytes and leaves the compressed pixel data alone, so there is no quality loss.

It only knows the formats it has a handler for. JPEG and TIFF work. For HEIC, or RAW files like CR2 and NEF, the Remove Properties link is often greyed out or clears only a subset of fields.

PowerShell has no native EXIF cmdlet. What it gives you is a good way to drive ExifTool, Phil Harvey's metadata utility, across thousands of files with filtering and logging. ExifTool edits the metadata segments directly, so the compressed image data comes out byte-for-byte identical — no quality loss, and no orphaned strings.

Install it:

# winget (built into Windows 11 and current Windows 10)
winget install -e --id OliverBetz.ExifTool

# or Chocolatey, if you already use it
choco install exiftool

Both install the Windows build of ExifTool and put exiftool on your PATH. You can also download the standalone executable from exiftool.org and call it by full path. Close and reopen PowerShell after installing so it picks up the new PATH.

Strip a folder, recursively:

# Every writable tag, every image, in place
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r C:\Users\you\Pictures\Album

# Only the GPS group — keeps camera model, ISO, aperture
exiftool -gps:all= -overwrite_original -r C:\Users\you\Pictures\Album

# Write clean copies to another folder, originals untouched
exiftool -all= -o C:\Users\you\Pictures\Clean\ -r C:\Users\you\Pictures\Album

# Keep the colour profile so colours don't shift
exiftool -all= --icc_profile:all -overwrite_original photo.jpg

Drop -overwrite_original and ExifTool saves the untouched file beside each result as photo.jpg_original. That is a safety net, but those backups still contain the full GPS data — delete them once you have verified the strip.

Filtering with Get-ChildItem:

# Only JPEGs modified in the last six months
Get-ChildItem C:\Photos -Recurse -Filter *.jpg |
  Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -gt (Get-Date).AddMonths(-6) } |
  ForEach-Object { exiftool -all= -overwrite_original $_.FullName }

That loop is slow on big batches. Each iteration starts a fresh exiftool process, and ExifTool is a Perl program with a noticeable startup cost — a few hundred milliseconds multiplied by ten thousand files is real time. Hand ExifTool the whole list at once instead, using an argument file:

Get-ChildItem C:\Photos -Recurse -Filter *.jpg |
  Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -gt (Get-Date).AddMonths(-6) } |
  Select-Object -ExpandProperty FullName |
  Set-Content -Encoding utf8 $env:TEMP\strip-list.txt

exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -@ $env:TEMP\strip-list.txt

-@ reads one argument per line, so ExifTool starts once and walks the list itself.

The quoting trap on Windows:

# PowerShell — single quotes stop $gpslatitude expanding as a PS variable
exiftool -r -if '$gpslatitude' -filename C:\Photos

# cmd.exe — the opposite: use double quotes
exiftool -r -if "$gpslatitude" -filename C:\Photos

ExifTool's -if conditions are full of $tagname references. In PowerShell a double-quoted "$gpslatitude" expands to an empty string before ExifTool ever sees it, and the command silently matches nothing. Single-quote them.

No-install fallback: .NET via PowerShell

On a locked-down machine where you cannot install ExifTool, the System.Drawing assembly that ships with Windows can drop the EXIF property block:

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Drawing

$src = 'C:\Photos\photo.jpg'
$dst = 'C:\Photos\photo-clean.jpg'

$img = [System.Drawing.Image]::FromFile($src)
foreach ($id in $img.PropertyIdList) { $img.RemovePropertyItem($id) }
$img.Save($dst, [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Jpeg)
$img.Dispose()

Three things to know before you trust it. FromFile holds a lock on the source until Dispose, which is why the script writes to a separate path rather than overwriting in place. Save decodes and re-encodes the JPEG, so you lose a little image quality unless you pass explicit EncoderParameters. And GDI+ handles the EXIF block but is not a general metadata engine — XMP packets and maker notes can survive it.

Treat it as a last resort, and verify the output rather than assuming.