EXIF Viewer

What sits in a photo's metadata

A camera writes more into the file than you can see in the frame: the camera model and serial number, the lens, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, the date with second precision, and the time zone. A smartphone adds GPS coordinates accurate to within a few meters.

All of this survives when the file is sent as an attachment in a messenger, uploaded to a file-sharing service, or posted on many websites.

The file stays on your device

Parsing runs in the browser. With services that read EXIF on their own servers, a photo with your home coordinates and your camera's serial number ends up on someone else's machine, and one of those services warns outright that it keeps uploads for twenty-four hours.

What the viewer shows

• shooting parameters: camera, lens, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length converted to the 35 mm equivalent, exposure value;
• coordinates in decimal degrees and in degrees with minutes, altitude, shooting direction, links to maps;
• a separate block on what the file reveals: the camera owner's name, serial numbers, the date, the unique image number;
• IPTC and XMP, the fields filled in by stock agencies and news desks;
• all tags in a list, with their codes and raw values.

Traces of editing

A photo straight from the camera and the same photo after an editor differ in a set of telltale signs. The shooting date and the modification date diverge, a program name appears, RAW development settings remain, and a C2PA manifest with the edit history gets added.

Another trace is the embedded preview. A camera puts a small copy of the frame into EXIF, and editors do not always update it. The viewer compares the aspect ratio of the preview and the photo by itself: if they diverge, the frame was cropped after the shot was taken.

Which files can be read

JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, TIFF, and DNG. Containers are read in full as well: the ICC profile, the file comment, PNG text fields. Parsing works through the file's bytes, so the extension does not matter.

An empty result is an answer too: social networks strip metadata on upload, so a photo downloaded from there has no EXIF.

How to remove metadata

If a photo is headed for publication, it makes sense to strip the extra fields beforehand. The metadata remover does exactly that: it re-saves the image without EXIF, GPS, and other blocks.