Remove EXIF metadata from an image in C#

Load the photo, call StripMetadata(), and save. The new file has no EXIF, XMP or IPTC block, so no GPS position, camera serial or capture time. Load has already turned the photo upright, so removing the orientation tag doesn’t turn it sideways. The program below cleans a Nikon photo with GPS from the public exif-samples collection.

dotnet new console -o StripExif && cd StripExif
dotnet add package RecursiveAI.OneImage --version 1.10.4
repo=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ianare/exif-samples/master
curl -L -o gps.jpg $repo/jpg/gps/DSCN0010.jpg

OneImage needs the .NET 10 SDK. Put this in Program.cs and run dotnet run:

using OneImage;
 
static void Show(string file)
{
    ExifData? exif = Image.Identify(file).Metadata.ReadExif();
    string gps = exif?.Gps is GpsPosition p
        ? $"{p.Latitude:F4}, {p.Longitude:F4}" : "none";
    string block = exif is null ? "none" : "present";
    Console.WriteLine($"{file}: EXIF {block}, GPS {gps}");
}
 
Show("gps.jpg");
 
// Everything but the pixels goes; keepIcc: true keeps the color profile.
Image.Load("gps.jpg").StripMetadata(keepIcc: true).Save("public.jpg");
Show("public.jpg");

gps.jpg: EXIF present, GPS 43.4674, 11.8851
public.jpg: EXIF none, GPS none

StripMetadata() without arguments also drops the ICC color profile, which can shift the colors of photos in wide-gamut spaces such as Adobe RGB; keepIcc: true keeps it.

Strip and resize in one call

For web copies, Image.Thumbnail resizes, turns the photo upright, converts it to sRGB (so the colors stay right without the original profile) and removes EXIF, XMP and IPTC:

using OneImage;
 
Image.Thumbnail("gps.jpg", 400).Save("thumb.jpg");
bool hasExif = Image.Identify("thumb.jpg").Metadata.ReadExif() is not null;
Console.WriteLine($"thumb.jpg: {(hasExif ? "EXIF present" : "no EXIF")}");

thumb.jpg: no EXIF

Limits

• The file is re-encoded. Removing metadata this way decodes and encodes the JPEG again, at quality 75 unless you set JpegEncoderOptions.Quality. OneImage doesn’t rewrite a JPEG’s metadata in place.
• It’s all or nothing. You can keep the ICC profile, but not, say, the copyright field alone. To keep everything except a few tags, use a dedicated EXIF editor.
• Plain Load and Save keep metadata, GPS included, so stripping has to be explicit, unless you use Thumbnail.

To read the fields before removing them, see Read EXIF data. Metadata handling is in the guide.