For years, image metadata meant EXIF: camera settings, GPS, timestamps. A newer layer is now appearing alongside it, designed for a different purpose. It is called C2PA — short for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity — and the user-facing brand for it is "Content Credentials." If you have used a recent version of certain editing tools or AI image generators, your exported images may already carry it.
What Content Credentials are for
The goal behind C2PA is good: to fight misinformation by attaching a tamper-evident record of an image's origin and edit history. The idea is that a viewer — or a platform — can check an image's credentials and see a trail like "captured by this camera model, edited in this application, and generated or modified with AI at this step." It is meant to help people tell authentic photos from manipulated or synthetic ones.
In an ideal world this is a transparency feature, not a surveillance one. But because it is metadata embedded in the file, it carries the same fundamental property as every other kind of metadata: it discloses information about you and your workflow to anyone who receives the file, regardless of whether you intended to share that information.
What a credential actually contains
A C2PA manifest is a cryptographically signed block embedded in the image. Depending on the tools used, it can include:
- A list of "assertions" describing actions taken on the image — captured, edited, AI-generated, AI-modified
- The software and version that performed each action
- The device or service identity that signed the manifest
- Timestamps for each step in the history
- Optionally, the creator's identity if they chose to attach it
- A hash of the image so any later change can be detected
The manifest is signed, which means it is not just descriptive — it is verifiable. That is the point for authenticity, but it also means the provenance trail is harder to dismiss as guesswork if it reveals something you would rather it did not.
Where it lives in the file
C2PA data is embedded differently per format. In JPEG it rides in an application segment (APP11). In PNG it is stored in a dedicated chunk (often seen as caBX). In other formats it sits in the equivalent metadata region. The common thread is that it is a discrete block that can be located and removed without touching the image pixels — which is exactly how our cleaner handles it across JPEG, PNG, WebP, and the other supported image formats.
The privacy trade-off: keep or remove?
This is the genuinely nuanced part, and reasonable people land in different places.
Reasons to keep credentials: if you are a photographer or journalist who wants to prove an image is authentic and unedited, the credential is your evidence. Removing it throws away that proof. For some professional contexts, the provenance trail is an asset, not a liability.
Reasons to remove them: for everyone else, the credential is just one more block of metadata describing your tools, your timeline, and sometimes your identity. If you generated or edited an image and simply want to share the result without broadcasting which AI tool or software you used and when, the credential works against you. There are also legitimate situations — whistleblowing, activism, ordinary privacy — where the workflow trail is exactly what you do not want attached.
The right answer depends on your goal. Our tools default to removing C2PA along with other metadata on the privacy-focused presets, because most people sharing an everyday image are not trying to publish a verifiable provenance claim. If you specifically need to preserve authenticity credentials, you would keep the original file for that purpose and only clean copies meant for general sharing.
A note on what removal does and does not mean
Removing a C2PA manifest from your copy of an image strips the provenance data from that file. It does not, and cannot, retroactively un-sign anything or affect copies others already hold. It also does not change the visible image. And it is worth being honest that provenance systems are evolving quickly: the specifics of where credentials are stored and how widely they are checked will keep changing. The durable principle is the one that applies to all metadata — know what your file carries before you share it, and decide deliberately rather than by default.
You can detect and remove C2PA Content Credentials along with EXIF, GPS, and XMP using the image tool on our home page — everything runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded. If you specifically work with AI-generated images, the AI image metadata remover is tuned for that case. For the broader picture of image metadata, see our guide on what your photos tell strangers.