A surprisingly common assumption is that deleting a photo from your phone or a website somehow "cleans up" the metadata problem after the fact — as if the act of deletion reaches out and scrubs every copy that photo ever spawned. It doesn't, because deleting and stripping metadata are two unrelated operations that happen to two different things.
When you delete a photo, you remove that specific file from that specific location — your camera roll, a cloud backup, a folder. Its metadata disappears along with it, but only because the whole file is gone. Nothing about that action reaches any other copy of the same image sitting somewhere else.
Stripping metadata is an edit: it rewrites a file in place (or produces a new copy), keeping the visible image but removing the embedded EXIF/IPTC/XMP block — GPS, timestamp, camera model, edit history. The file still exists afterward; it's just missing that hidden data. This has nothing to do with deletion, and doing one doesn't do the other.
Deleting your own local copy after the fact does nothing to any of these. The metadata in each of those copies is exactly what it was the moment you sent or posted it.
Strip metadata before a photo leaves your device — not after you've already shared it and are having second thoughts. Once a copy exists somewhere you don't control, there's no remote "undo" for what's embedded inside it.
Use AiEraser's View mode to check what a file is carrying before you send it, and Remove mode to strip it — both run entirely in your browser, with nothing uploaded for JPEG, PNG, or WebP files.