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Supported attachment metadata cleanup happens automatically and locally before encryption, whether you use the Wipe.me website or the wipeme CLI. Your original files are never modified. In the browser, File fields such as lastModified and relative paths are never serialized into the Wipe.me attachment descriptor. Cleanup runs when an attachment is added and again immediately before encryption as a defense-in-depth measure. The CLI stages a protected temporary copy only when cleanup changes a supported attachment, encrypts that copy locally, and leaves the source file unchanged.

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Supported cleanup

  • JPEG/JPG: removes APP1 EXIF/XMP, APP13 IPTC/Photoshop metadata, and JPEG comments without re-encoding the compressed pixel scan. JFIF and ICC/color data remain so rendering and color are preserved.
  • PNG/APNG: removes eXIf, iTXt, tEXt, zTXt, tIME, and pHYs chunks. Pixel and animation data and ICC/color chunks remain.
  • WebP: removes EXIF and XMP chunks and clears their VP8X feature flags while preserving pixel data, ICC, alpha, and animation.
  • MP3: removes ID3v2 and ID3v1 tags while preserving audio frames.
On the website, images that you explicitly compress are re-encoded locally as JPEG, so private metadata from the source is not carried over. The browser may write a generic color profile to the new JPEG. The CLI does not compress images.

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Unsupported formats

Unsupported formats are currently sent byte-for-byte inside the encrypted envelope. Wipe.me does not generically rewrite PDFs, Office documents, archives, video containers, or audio formats other than MP3: without a format-specific parser, rewriting can corrupt content or invalidate signatures. If metadata in one of those formats is a concern, sanitize the file before attaching it.
No attachment bytes or metadata are sent to a third-party processing service. Cleanup and encryption happen locally. Optional image compression is a browser feature and also happens locally.

Command-line interface

Create private links with automatic local cleanup for supported attachment metadata.

Image compression and the 3 MiB limit

Learn how the website estimates the complete envelope and safely compresses compatible images.