Exifpurge Drag Drop Metad

ExifPurge removes hidden metadata from images without touching a single
pixel. No re-encoding. No format conversion. No quality loss. Drop a
photo on the popup, hit Clean, get the same image back — minus the
GPS coordinates, datetime, camera serial, edit history, and everything
else that quietly travels with the file.

🔬 BINARY-LEVEL STRIPPING — NOT A CANVAS REDRAW
Most "EXIF removers" load the image into a <canvas>, redraw the pixels,
and re-save as JPEG. That works in the most literal sense (the metadata
goes away) but it ALSO converts every PNG to JPEG, kills GIF animations,
flattens transparent images onto a white background, drops the ICC
color profile, and re-compresses the pixel data with a lossy codec.
ExifPurge parses the file format directly:
• JPEG → walk APP0/APP1/APP2/APP13/COM segments, drop the ones that
carry metadata, copy everything else verbatim including the
Huffman-coded pixel data.
• PNG → walk IHDR/IDAT/IEND/tEXt/zTXt/iTXt/eXIf/tIME/iCCP chunks,
drop the ones that carry metadata, keep the rest CRC-intact.
• WebP → walk RIFF chunks (VP8/VP8L/VP8X/ANIM/ANMF/EXIF/XMP/ICCP),
drop metadata chunks, recompute the container size, patch the VP8X
feature flags so decoders don't expect chunks that aren't there.
• GIF → walk extension blocks, drop Comment + Application Extensions
(except NETSCAPE2.0 — which carries the animation loop count).

The result: byte-identical pixel data, original format preserved, file
typically a few KB smaller, animations and transparency intact.

🗺 WHAT GETS REMOVED
• GPS coordinates — exact location the photo was taken
• Date and time — when the photo was taken
• Camera model + serial — device fingerprint
• Software trail — every app that ever edited the image
• Author and copyright fields — IPTC and XMP
• Edit history — Adobe Lightroom keeps the entire edit log in XMP
• Comments and notes — whatever a previous tool may have embedded

🎨 WHAT STAYS BY DEFAULT
• ICC color profile (toggle it off if you want a smaller file at the
cost of visible color shift on calibrated screens)
• Animation in GIFs (frames, timing, loop count all preserved)
• Transparency in PNG and WebP
• Original file format and pixel data — bit for bit

🖼 SUPPORTED FORMATS
JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF (animated). TIFF is intentionally NOT listed —
browsers can't reliably decode it and most users don't actually have
TIFF files. HEIC inputs convert through the OS share sheet on iPhones
before they ever hit a desktop browser, so we don't claim support for
a format we can't honestly handle.

🔒 PRIVACY-FIRST DESIGN
• 100% local. Zero network requests. The extension makes no XHR, no
fetch, no WebSocket, no analytics call.
• No host_permissions. The popup can't read any tab content.
• No content scripts. Pages you visit can't see the extension at all.
• Only "storage" permission — used to remember your dark-mode setting
and the "Keep color profile" toggle. Stored in chrome.storage.sync,
synced via your own Chrome account, never seen by us.
• Open source, auditable. The whole stripping logic is four short JS
files under /lib.

📋 SHARE-READY OUTPUT
After cleaning, ExifPurge lets you:
• Download the file to its original location with a "_cleaned" suffix
• Copy the image to your system clipboard (auto-converted to PNG for
clipboard-compat where necessary)
• Inspect exactly what was removed ("Removed: EXIF · XMP · IPTC")

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WHY v2?

The v1 extension worked in the literal sense — metadata was gone —
but it silently:
- Converted every PNG / GIF / WebP / BMP to JPEG
- Flattened transparent images onto a white background
- Reduced animated GIFs to a single frame
- Re-encoded JPEGs through canvas at quality 0.85–0.92, introducing
visible artefacts on screenshots and graphics
- Dropped the ICC color profile (visible color shift on most screens)

v2 keeps the same drag-and-drop UX but replaces the engine with
real binary parsers, one per format. The output is the input minus
its metadata. Nothing more, nothing less.

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CHANGELOG

2.0.0 — Complete rewrite.
• Binary-level metadata stripping per format (JPEG / PNG / WebP / GIF)
• Original format preserved (PNG stays PNG, GIF keeps animation)
• Zero quality loss (no canvas re-encode)
• ICC color profile preserved by default
• Metadata preview before cleaning ("Found in this image: …")
• Cleaned summary ("Removed: EXIF · XMP")
• Self-contained — no CDN dependencies, no host permissions
• Inline SVG icons (offline-friendly)

1.0 — Initial release.

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CREDITS

ExifPurge has no third-party runtime dependencies. The binary parsers
are written from scratch against the public JPEG, PNG, WebP, and GIF
specs.

If you find a bug — particularly with a strange JPEG that doesn't strip
correctly — please report it.