Remove metadata from a TIFF

Why this one is different

JPEG, PNG and WebP are sequential: cleaning them means copying every byte except a few ranges. TIFF is random-access, so we rebuild the whole file — new tag directories, relocated values, and rewritten strip offsets — then verify the result still decodes rather than assuming it does.

We remove the camera make and model, software, timestamps, artist, copyright, and the entire EXIF and GPS sub-directories. We keep everything needed to decode and display, including orientation.

What we deliberately keep

• Orientation, resolution and colour-space tags, so the image still displays right-side up and prints at the correct size.
• Every strip of pixel data, relocated but never altered — only its offsets change as the file is rebuilt.

What a real dump looks like

A TIFF's tags aren't stored in file order — the Image File Directory (IFD) is a lookup table of tag ID, type, count, and either the value itself or an offset to where it lives elsewhere in the file. That indirection is what makes TIFF flexible enough to hold everything from a scanned document to raw sensor data, and it's also why removing a tag safely means rebuilding the whole directory: delete one entry and every offset after it in the file is now wrong.

Camera-written TIFFs carry an EXIF sub-IFD using the same tag layout a JPEG's EXIF block uses — Make, Model, GPS, serials, timestamps — because the TIFF 6.0 specification explicitly reserves tag space for exactly this. Scanner-written TIFFs typically skip EXIF entirely but carry Software and DateTime, plus occasionally the operator name if the scanning software was configured with one.

TIFF carries more than just EXIF and GPS

Because TIFF's IFD structure is a general-purpose tag lookup rather than a JPEG-style fixed set of marker segments, it has reserved tag numbers for the same metadata systems a JPEG carries in separate APPn segments: an XMP packet, an IPTC record, and a Photoshop resource block, each addressable by its own tag ID rather than living in a distinct container. A TIFF that's been through Photoshop can carry all three at once, layered on top of whatever the scanning or capturing device wrote into the EXIF sub-IFD — every one of them removed here, not just the camera fields.

One tag survives on purpose and it's worth naming: Orientation. Unlike a JPEG or PNG, where the equivalent tag lives inside the EXIF block that gets removed as one unit, TIFF's Orientation tag sits in the primary image directory — the part needed to decode and display the image correctly, not the part identifying who made it. Removing EXIF and GPS here doesn't touch it, which is exactly why a cleaned TIFF still displays right-side up even though a cleaned JPEG, in principle, might not if it depended on the tag this format keeps structurally separate. See does removing metadata reduce quality? for the full version of that distinction.

What survives common editors

TIFF's random-access structure means most editors that open and re-save one — Photoshop, GIMP, ImageMagick — rebuild the IFD from scratch on save, which strips orphaned tags but also means the software faithfully re-writes whatever tags it still recognises, including GPS and serials, unless you explicitly ask it not to. Command-line and batch scanning pipelines are the more common leak source in practice: a scan-to-TIFF workflow configured once, years ago, keeps stamping every file with the same operator name and department code until someone checks.

Cleaning something else?

If a JPG export of the same scan exists, check that too — it carries a completely different set of tags. Handling a mix of raw scans and finished photos? The batch cleaner covers a whole folder without a file limit.