Most metadata tools assume EXIF means JPEG. Feed them a PNG and they either do nothing useful or quietly re-encode the image, which flattens transparency and leaves the actual metadata sitting where it was.
That assumption is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that gives people false confidence. PNG carries text records and can carry a full EXIF block. HEIC carries everything a JPEG does inside a different structure. Screenshots carry less than a photo and more than nothing.
How to remove metadata from a PNG properly
A PNG is a sequence of labelled chunks: a header, the compressed image data, an end marker, and any number of optional chunks in between. Metadata lives in those optional chunks, so removing it means editing the list rather than touching the picture.
Done that way, nothing about the image changes. The IHDR header keeps its bit depth and colour type, every IDAT block survives byte for byte, and transparency is exactly as it was. Our image metadata remover works this way for PNG, JPEG and WebP.
The common alternative is to draw the image onto a canvas element and export it again. That does delete the metadata, because canvas cannot carry any, and it also replaces your image data with a fresh encode of what the canvas painted. For a transparent PNG that frequently means a white background, and it can change bit depth without saying so.
PNG text chunks explained
Four chunk types hold text, and they differ mainly in encoding.
tEXt stores plain Latin-1 key and value pairs — Author, Description, Software, Copyright, Creation Time. iTXt is the same idea in UTF-8, so it handles any language. zTXt is compressed tEXt, which means a viewer that does not decompress it will report the file as clean when it is not. tIME records when the file was last modified.
Since 2017 the specification also includes an eXIf chunk holding a complete EXIF block, GPS and all. Phones and editors that export PNG increasingly write it, so a modern PNG can carry exactly what a JPEG does.
The practical upshot: a graphic exported from a design tool often contains the software name, sometimes the account holder's name, and occasionally a description nobody meant to publish. You can see what a specific file holds in our metadata viewer, which reads all four chunk types.
HEIC metadata on iPhone, and why we refuse to strip it
HEIC is the default on iPhone and it is a different animal. Rather than a flat sequence, it uses the ISO base media container — the same box structure as MP4 — where metadata sits in nested boxes and other parts of the file hold byte offsets pointing into that structure.
Cut a box out and every offset after it is wrong. Rebuilding them correctly is real work, and getting it subtly wrong produces a file that opens in some viewers and fails in others, which is worse than a clear refusal. So our tool declines HEIC and says why, rather than handing you something that might be broken.
The reliable route is to convert first. Use our image format converter to produce a JPEG, then strip that. The conversion drops most metadata as a side effect and the strip removes whatever survived. You also get a file that opens everywhere, which is usually why people are converting anyway.
Worth knowing: AirDrop and the Files app hand over the original HEIC with everything intact. The iOS share sheet has an Options panel where location can be switched off before sending, which is the fastest fix for a single photo.
Do screenshots contain metadata worth removing?
Some, though not the kind people fear.
A screenshot has no camera, no lens, no exposure settings and no GPS, because none of those existed at the moment of capture. What it does carry is the device model, the operating system version and a creation timestamp. On some platforms the pixel dimensions alone identify the exact hardware.
Is that worth stripping? For a screenshot posted to a support forum, probably not. For anything shared under a pseudonym it might be, since a consistent device fingerprint across posts is a linking signal. The bigger risk with screenshots is always what is visible in them — a notification bar, a browser tab, an email address, a partly obscured window behind the thing you meant to capture.
One popular trick is worth correcting. Screenshotting a photo to strip its EXIF does work, because the screenshot is a new file that inherits nothing. It also costs you resolution and adds your own device fields. Removing the metadata properly is faster and lossless.
WebP and AVIF metadata: newer is not cleaner
Both modern formats carry metadata, and both are less well understood by the tools people reach for.
WebP wraps everything in RIFF chunks, with named blocks for EXIF, XMP and ICC. Removing them requires rewriting the file-size field in the header, which is a detail plenty of tools get wrong and which our stripper handles. AVIF uses the same box structure as HEIC and carries the same difficulty, so we treat it the same way.
The pattern to take away is that a newer container does not mean a cleaner file. It usually means fewer inspection tools support it, so metadata sits there unread rather than absent. If a tool cannot tell you what is inside a file, treat that as unknown rather than empty.
Choosing the right route for your file
JPEG, PNG and WebP can be cleaned losslessly, so do that and keep your quality. HEIC and AVIF need converting to JPEG first, which is a small quality cost on an already-compressed photo and a reliable result. Screenshots are already PNG or JPEG and clean like any other file.
Whatever the format, check the result the first few times rather than trusting a success message. And if location is the specific worry, our photo GPS checker answers that question alone. The general background on the fields themselves is in our EXIF explainer, and the routine for pre-upload cleaning is in the checklist for sharing photos.
Cleaning per file is the fallback, not the plan. Whatever container your phone writes, stopping it tagging photos in the first place removes the field before it exists, and that works identically for HEIC, JPEG and everything else.