EXIF Viewer

How to view photo metadata online in one step

Drop the picture on the panel above. The fields appear immediately, grouped so the identifying ones are not buried among shutter speeds.

Nothing is uploaded. The file is read inside this browser tab, and there is no upload request to inspect because none is made. That matters more here than on most tools — the photos people check are usually the ones they are worried about, and handing them to a stranger's server to find out is a strange way to protect them.

The cost is a size ceiling. Your browser holds the whole file in memory, so very large images will struggle on a modest laptop. We would rather state that than let you find it with a frozen tab.

What hidden data in photos actually contains

Most people expect the camera model. The rest of the list surprises them.

• GPS coordinates, accurate to a few metres, plus altitude and sometimes a separate GPS timestamp. This is the field that turns a photo of your living room into your address.
• The camera body's serial number. Many DSLRs and mirrorless bodies write it into every frame. Model says you own a common camera; serial number ties every photo you have ever posted to one physical device.
• Two or three timestamps — when the shutter fired, when the file was digitised, when it was last written.
• Artist and copyright fields, which cameras will happily fill with your full name if you once typed it into a settings menu and forgot.
• Editing software and version, added by Lightroom, Photoshop and phone editors.

One caveat worth stating plainly. We read the standard fields properly, and we do not parse MakerNote — a manufacturer-private block where each vendor stores extra settings in undocumented formats that change between models. Assume a photo may carry more than any viewer displays. There is more on what the fields mean in what EXIF data is.

Reading camera settings from a photo

The technical half of the file is the half photographers actually want. Shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length, metering mode, white balance and exposure program all sit in the same block as the location data.

It is genuinely useful. Work out which aperture your lens is sharpest at, or the slowest shutter speed you can hand-hold, by reading your own keepers rather than guessing. Photographers have been doing this since digital cameras started recording it.

The awkward part is that the useful fields and the identifying fields travel together. There is no format-level way to keep the exposure record and drop the coordinates — you either publish the block or you strip it. Most people never have to make that trade because they never look.

Why our EXIF viewer never uploads your file

Because of what these files are. People check photos of their homes, their children, rental listings, evidence for a dispute, pictures they are about to put on a dating profile. Those are the last images that should sit in a stranger's temporary folder, however short the stated retention.

Plenty of competing tools do upload, and most say the file is deleted afterwards. We have no reason to doubt them and no way to check, and neither do you. Reading the file locally removes the question rather than answering it.

The honest limit: this protects the file, not the photo. If you have already posted the picture somewhere, the platform holds its own copy along with whatever it read before stripping anything — which is covered in whether Instagram removes EXIF data.

When an image metadata viewer finds nothing

An empty result is ambiguous, and treating it as good news is the common mistake.

It may mean the camera never wrote anything, which is normal for screenshots and exported graphics. It may mean something already stripped the file — a messaging app, a social platform, an export dialog. Or it may mean the file uses a container we could not read, in which case we say so explicitly rather than showing a reassuring blank table.

That distinction is why the panel above separates “no metadata found” from “we could not read this file”. A parser that quietly fails and implies your photo is clean is worse than one that admits defeat. If you want to stop the data being written at all, see how to turn off geotagging.

What a JPEG EXIF analyzer cannot tell you

Metadata describes what a file claims about itself. It is not evidence.

Every field here can be rewritten in seconds with freely available tools. A timestamp can be moved, a camera model invented, coordinates copied from another photo entirely. AI-generated images usually carry almost no metadata, and nothing stops someone pasting convincing camera fields onto one.

So a rich, consistent metadata block is weak supporting evidence, and a missing one proves nothing at all. We spell out what does and does not survive scrutiny in whether EXIF data can be trusted. If you need the location specifically rather than the whole field list, the photo GPS viewer puts coordinates straight on a map. For video files, our video metadata extractor reads the equivalent container fields.

Look before you share

An EXIF viewer earns its keep in the ten seconds before you upload something, not in the week after. Open the photo, read what is in it, and decide deliberately rather than by default.

If it carries something you would rather not publish, remove EXIF data produces a clean copy without re-encoding the picture. Working with PNG files, HEIC from an iPhone, or screenshots? Those behave differently and are covered in removing metadata from PNG files. And if you are preparing images for a listing or a profile, the checklist in cleaning a photo before posting it is the practical version of this page. Need the picture smaller as well? Resize the photo first, then check it again.