Does stripping metadata reduce photo quality?

No. On JPG, PNG and WebP the metadata blocks are cut out of the file container and the image data is copied through untouched. Nothing is decoded or re-encoded, so the picture is the same picture, just smaller on disk.

What happens to HEIC photos from an iPhone?

HEIC cannot be edited in place, so the tool draws the image to a canvas and hands back a PNG instead. That does remove every field, but the pixels are re-encoded and the PNG is usually much larger than the HEIC was. The batch processor is stricter. It hands HEIC straight to the browser's own decoder with no fallback, so on a browser that can't read HEIC natively the file is listed as a failure instead of being converted. Do HEIC files in the single-photo tool.

How do I know the metadata is really gone?

The tool parses its own output after stripping and reports what survived. A clean result says zero identifying fields remain. You can also drop the cleaned file back in as a fresh upload and read it again.

Could the photo look rotated after stripping?

It can. On JPEG the orientation tag lives inside the same EXIF block that gets removed, so a photo that relied on it may display sideways in some viewers. Check the Orientation row in the Image group before you strip, and if it is not the normal horizontal value, rotate the photo first.

Does this hide what is visible in the picture itself?

No. Metadata sits beside the pixels, not in them. A street sign, a house number or a face is still there after the strip. Use the Pixelate tool for that. It covers the whole image, a centre block or a horizontal middle band, so it suits a face or a plate near the middle of the frame. Anything off to one side means pixelating the whole picture.

Remove GPS Data From Photos Before Posting

See the GPS, camera and timestamp data hiding in your photos, then cut it out in your browser without recompressing a single pixel. Batch a whole folder at once.