Sometimes. Whether converting removes metadata depends on the converter, not on the format you pick. We converted one test JPEG loaded with GPS coordinates, a camera make and model, a capture date, XMP and IPTC captions, a Display P3 colour profile and a C2PA manifest, using four tools. Two gave back clean files at their default settings. The other two kept the GPS position.
One file, four converters
We read every output with ExifTool. The test file was made for the purpose, with coordinates we typed in, but a real phone photo carries the same fields.
| Converter and output | GPS, camera, date | XMP captions | IPTC | Colour profile | C2PA manifest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WipeTheAI free tools, to JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF | Gone | Gone | Gone | Gone, after converting to sRGB | Gone |
| cwebp 1.6.0 at its default settings, to WebP | Gone | Gone | Gone | Gone | Gone |
| cwebp 1.6.0 with -metadata all | Kept | Kept | Gone | Kept | Gone |
| macOS sips, to JPG | Kept | Kept | Kept | Kept | Gone |
| macOS sips, to PNG or HEIC | Kept | Kept; the PNG also got a second copy of the GPS in XMP | Gone | Kept | Gone |
| ffmpeg 8.1, to PNG | Kept | Gone | Gone | Kept | Gone |
Like every converter we tried, sips and ffmpeg dropped the C2PA manifest, yet they kept the GPS, which is backwards for anyone converting a photo for privacy.
If privacy is why you are converting, the format change is not the step that protects you. Check the output.
What our converters take out, and what that costs
Our free tools, from Compress to JPG to WebP, open the picture on your device, take the raw pixels, and save a new file from those pixels alone. Nothing from the old file is copied across, so there is nothing to forget to remove. In our tests no re-encoded output, whether JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF, carried EXIF, GPS, XMP, IPTC, an ICC profile, a C2PA manifest or PNG text chunks. A JPEG we produce holds a bare JFIF header and the image. We think stripping by re-encoding is the right default for a free converter, even with the costs below, because nobody gets a file that quietly kept their address.
Rotation is the first thing that could go wrong, and doesn’t. Phones often store a photo sideways and add a tag telling viewers to turn it. Drop the tag and the photo lies on its side. Our tools turn the pixels first: a 1408×768 test photo tagged to be rotated came out as a 768×1408 image with no rotation tag left, the right way up.
Colour is the real cost. An iPhone photo tagged Display P3 can hold greens and reds that ordinary sRGB can’t show. Our tools convert the picture to sRGB before saving and then drop the profile, so colours inside sRGB come out as they looked. We checked this on a P3-tagged test photo: the average colour of our output (75.9, 70.9, 64.2) matched the photo read with its profile, not the same pixels read without it (76.0, 71.5, 65.6). Colours beyond sRGB have to be pulled in to the nearest ones sRGB can show. Our test photo was muted. It lost almost nothing, and we haven’t measured how much a saturated P3 shot, a sunset or a neon sign, gives up. A 16-bit PNG goes down to 8-bit colour the same way.
The print setting goes too. Our test file said 300 dpi; the converted JPEG says nothing, and software that sizes prints from that tag falls back to its own default. Every pixel is still there, so a print shop that works in pixels won’t notice.
One path keeps a little. When Compress can’t make a file smaller, it hands back your original picture instead of a bigger copy, cleaned without re-encoding. That cleaner keeps the colour profile on purpose, and on a JPEG stored sideways it keeps the rotation tag alone so the photo still stands upright. In our test, a rotated JPEG that took this path came back with exactly one EXIF entry: Orientation. No camera, GPS or date fields came with it. The tool marks those files “already as small as it gets, kept the original picture”.
Two limits on our table. We tested command-line tools, not the export dialogs in Preview, Photos or Windows, and not online converters, so we can’t tell you what those keep. And the result for a converter can change with a setting, as cwebp shows: the same program went from clean to keeping GPS with one flag.
Metadata is one layer of three
A metadata-free file can still carry an invisible watermark. Google’s SynthID sits in the pixels of images from its AI tools, and Google says it is designed to survive cropping and filters, and lossy compression too. A format change is a lossy re-save. Expect the mark to stay. The SynthID explainer covers how the mark works.
The third layer is the platform. Sites run their own checks and decide their own labels, and no file edit controls those. How provenance records, pixel watermarks and platform labels differ is laid out in C2PA vs SynthID vs platform labels.
So the free tools are for smaller files and new formats. They strip metadata as a side effect of saving a new file, on your device, with no sign-in. The Wipe tool is the one built for AI provenance. It needs a Google sign-in, lists the AI signals it finds in the file before and after, and offers a pass that changes the pixels to disrupt marks like SynthID. No public detector can confirm the result, so we don’t promise one.
Checking a converted file yourself
Run exiftool -G1 -a -s converted.jpg and read the group names on the left. GPS, IFD0, ExifIFD, XMP, IPTC, ICC_Profile and JUMBF are the ones that matter here; if none appear, the file is as bare as ours.