how it works.

what's in a file.

most files carry information that isn't part of what you see. a photo from a phone is a typical example. one might hold:

gps

34.0522° N, 118.2437° W

where it was taken.

taken

2026-11-02 14:38:11 −08:00

when it was taken, to the second.

make / model

Apple iPhone 17 Pro

the phone that took it.

owner name

Dana Example

set once in the camera settings.

thumbnail

160 × 120 jpeg

a small copy of the photo from before it was cropped.

none of this shows when you look at the photo, but anyone you send the file to can read it.

what strip reads.

photosjpeg, heic, png, webp, tiff

location, the time it was taken, the camera or phone and its serial number, owner and artist names, editing history, embedded previews, face tags and captions.

pdfs

author, the software that made it, creation and edit dates, comment authors, a document id, and earlier versions still saved inside the file.

office filesdocx, xlsx, pptx

author, last editor, company, total editing time, the names on comments and tracked changes, the template's file path, and the photos inside the document.

videosmp4, mov

recording location, the phone or camera model, software version, recording time, and the id that pairs a video with a live photo.

anything else

the file type, size, sha-256 hash and first few bytes. strip says plainly that it has no parser for it yet.

what a clean copy is.

the clean copy has the same name and the same contents. only the information strip listed is removed.

color profile

kept by default. it makes colors display correctly and says nothing about you. untick it to remove it.

rotation

kept by default so the picture stays the right way up. untick it to remove it.

comments

in office files, comments and tracked changes are kept by default, with the names and dates removed. untick it to delete the comments and accept every change.

picture and sound

never re-encoded. strip removes the data stored around the image or video and leaves the picture and sound untouched, so nothing loses quality.

checking

after you download, choose "check the clean copy" or drop the copy back in. strip reads it with the same code that found the data the first time.

checking that nothing is uploaded.

01

open your browser's developer tools and go to the network tab.

02

drop a file in, download the clean copy, and check it.

03

look at the list of requests. the only ones there are the page's own scripts and stylesheet, and none of them carry your file.

two things back this up. the page is sent with a security policy that tells your browser to block every connection the page tries to make, so even a bug in strip couldn't send your file anywhere. and the site won't build if code that can make network requests ends up in it.

what strip can't do.

strip removes information stored alongside the content. it can't change the content itself.

what's visible

faces, street signs, reflections, screens and anything else in the picture stay in the picture.

the filename

the clean copy keeps the original name. rename it if the name says too much.

hidden watermarks

some images and documents carry marks hidden in the pixels themselves. strip doesn't change pixels, so these stay.

camera sensors

each camera sensor leaves a faint noise pattern in its photos that can link them to the same camera.

printer dots

many color printers add a faint dot pattern with their serial number. it shows up in scans of printed pages.

file dates

your computer records when the copy was downloaded. that is stored by your computer, not in the file.

video tracks

some videos store location as a separate track that runs alongside the video. strip shows it but can't remove it yet.

attachments

files attached inside a pdf or office document are left as they are.

locked files

password-protected pdfs and raw camera files can be read but not cleaned yet.