We gave the same AI image to ExifTool and to the cleaning step inside WipeTheAI, and got back the same file: 800,473 bytes, identical to the last byte. The original was an 806,499-byte JPEG from a Google tool carrying a 6,026-byte C2PA manifest, and both tools deleted exactly that and nothing else. A macOS re-save of the same image came out at 267,546 bytes. We left the screenshot out of the byte count, since there is no original data in it to compare.
For removing AI metadata and nothing more, we’d pick ExifTool. It’s free. It needs no account, and it leaves the picture data alone. The rest of this page is the case for that, the cases where it’s the wrong pick, and what each of the other three options actually does to a file.
The four options, side by side
| ExifTool | Screenshot | Re-export from an editor | WipeTheAI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Free | Free with the app | About $0.10 or $0.50 an image, see pricing |
| Needs | A terminal | Nothing | An editor | A Google sign-in |
| Removes C2PA and EXIF | Yes | Yes | Yes in our test, but it depends on the app | Yes, except a JPEG’s rotation flag |
| Picture data afterwards | Unchanged, byte for byte | A new capture of your screen | Re-compressed | Changed on purpose: a light pass or a regeneration |
| Original colour profile | Kept by the command below. The broad one can drop it | Not carried over | Up to the app | Kept by the cleaner, not yet confirmed through the re-save |
| Pixel watermark such as SynthID | Untouched | Can survive | Designed to survive compression | Disrupted in Maximum disruption mode |
| Shows you what was there | Yes, if you run a second command | No | No | Before and after, side by side |
ExifTool: our pick for metadata alone
The command that deletes C2PA and only C2PA is exiftool -jumbf:all= photo.jpg. That is what produced the 800,473-byte file above, with the JFIF header and every byte of image data still in place. The broader exiftool -all= photo.jpg also removes EXIF, XMP and IPTC in one go. On our test file it removed the JFIF header too and landed at 800,455 bytes. ExifTool’s documentation warns that -all= removes colour space information, so a photo tagged with a wide-gamut profile can shift colour unless you copy those tags back, and it leaves the Adobe APP14 segment in place by default for the same reason. Read that warning before you batch a folder of phone photos.
What it won’t do is tell you, unprompted, what was in the file. You run a second command for that. The fields worth asking for are in the guide to checking Content Credentials.
It is the wrong pick in two cases. If you aren’t comfortable in a terminal, the colour warning above is exactly the kind of thing that goes wrong unnoticed. And if the image came from Gemini, or from ChatGPT since May 2026, the metadata is the smaller part of what marks it: both now add a SynthID watermark to the pixels, and no metadata tool touches that.
The screenshot
Every metadata field goes, because a screenshot is a new file that never had any. So does a lot else. The new image is only as large as the picture was on your screen, scaled by your display, which for a big image in a small window can be a fraction of the original resolution. The original’s embedded colour profile does not come along either. The capture gets whatever your system assigns.
And the watermark can stay. OpenAI’s own launch note for C2PA named screenshots as one of the easy ways to lose the manifest; SynthID sits in the pixels the screenshot copies. For what it costs in quality, the screenshot removes nothing ExifTool doesn’t. People use it because it is quick, which is fair, but it is the one we’d never recommend.
Re-exporting from an editor
We used sips, the image tool built into macOS, as the stand-in for “open it and save a copy.” The manifest was gone. The file had also shrunk to a third of its size, because the pixels had been compressed again at the tool’s default quality. It also added an EXIF colour space tag that wasn’t in the original. Our test file had no ICC profile, so we can’t tell you from this test what an editor does to one. And an editor that supports Content Credentials can write its own manifest into the export, so check that setting if you go this way.
WipeTheAI
When you add an image, the cleaning happens on your device: the C2PA segment or chunk, EXIF, XMP, IPTC and PNG text chunks go, and the ICC profile, gamma and sRGB colour chunks stay. A JPEG stored sideways keeps one EXIF field, its rotation flag, so a phone photo still opens the right way up. That step is the one that matched ExifTool byte for byte. You need to sign in with Google first.
What you download is not that file. That is the trade to understand before you use it. Both modes change the pixels on purpose. “Keep it looking the same” runs a light pass on your device, scaling the image down and back up, then saves it in the same format it came in (a JPEG at quality 0.92). Maximum disruption regenerates the picture to disrupt a SynthID-style watermark. That mode uploads your image to our servers, and the tool warns you before it does. It passed Gemini’s provenance check on all three of our test images, which is a classifier judgment and not Google’s production detector, and results vary by image. Both show a similarity score, a before and after slider, and the file’s signals before and after.
We haven’t yet confirmed that a Display P3 profile survives that final save. The cleaner keeps it; the re-save is the open question, and until we have tested it we won’t claim otherwise.
So our own tool is the right pick when the watermark matters to you as well as the metadata, or when you want to see what was in the file without reading tag dumps. The three-layer explainer covers why the watermark is a separate problem, and the pricing page has the packs.
For metadata alone, our tool is the more expensive way to get a slightly worse file.