HEIC Metadata Viewer
You opened a HEIC in an EXIF tool and got an empty table. The data is there — the tool looked in the wrong part of the file. This HEIC metadata viewer reads the place HEIC actually keeps it and shows you every field.
Capture time, camera body, exposure, coordinates. Read in your browser, with the picture never decoded and your file never written to.
Drop a HEIC photo to read its data
The picture is never decoded. We read the bytes, find the EXIF box, and show you what is in it.
How to read HEIC EXIF data without special software
Drop the photo above. We read the raw bytes, walk to the metadata box, and list what is in it. The picture itself is never decoded, which makes this much faster than opening the photo.
We tell clients to check metadata before doing anything else to a photo. Every conversion destroys it, so the order matters: read first, convert second. Get that backwards and the capture time is gone for good.
Where iPhone photo metadata actually lives
HEIF is a box format. The file is a sequence of chunks, each declaring its own type and length, and one of those chunks — the meta box — holds an index of everything the file contains.
EXIF is one of those indexed items. To find it properly you read the index, get an offset, and jump there. JPEG does none of this: it puts EXIF in an APP1 segment right after the file header, where any reader trips over it immediately.
That structural difference is the entire reason your EXIF tool showed nothing. It was not broken and your photo was not empty. The tool was written for a format that keeps things somewhere else.
What the heic GPS location field can tell a stranger
More than most people expect. A photo taken at home carries the coordinates of your home, accurate to a few metres, in a field that survives being emailed, backed up, and forwarded.
We show you the raw numbers and stop there. We do not resolve them to an address and we do not embed a map, because embedding a map means sending somebody's home coordinates to a third-party tile service. If you want that, our photo location viewer does it as a deliberate choice rather than a default.
The realistic caveat: most photos you receive have already lost this. Messaging apps re-encode on send and drop every metadata box in the process. Coordinates usually survive AirDrop, email attachments and cloud downloads.
Reading the date taken when the timestamp looks wrong
Check which field you are reading. Photos carry several timestamps and they mean different things.
| Field | What it records |
|---|---|
| DateTimeOriginal | When the shutter fired. This is the one you usually want. |
| DateTimeDigitized | When the image became a file. Identical to the above on a digital camera. |
| DateTime | When the file was last modified. An edit moves this and leaves the others alone. |
| GPSDateStamp | UTC, from the satellites. Handy for working out the real time zone. |
The classic trap is time zones. DateTimeOriginal is local wall-clock time with no zone recorded, so a holiday photo reads as the hour it was where you were standing. Comparing it against GPSDateStamp, which is UTC, gives you the offset.
What the brand code tells you about your file
Beside the file name we show a four-letter code read from the file header. It is the ftyp brand, and it is the first thing any reader checks.
heic— HEVC-compressed stills. What an iPhone writes.heix— the same, at ten bits per channel.mif1— generic HEIF that does not commit to a codec.avif— the same container with AV1 inside. A HEIC decoder will not read it.
This matters when a file will not open. A photo named .heic carrying an avif brand explains itself instantly, and the brand recorded in the header is the fastest way to settle what you are actually holding.
Why the table comes back empty sometimes
An empty result is a real answer, not a failure. Three common causes, in rough order of how often we see them.
It went through a messaging app. Most re-encode on send. The photo survives, the metadata does not.
It is a screenshot. Screenshots have no camera, no lens and no coordinates, because no camera was involved.
Someone stripped it deliberately. Which is a reasonable thing to do before sharing, and the reason our strip that metadata out tool exists.
When the file itself is the problem
If we cannot read a photo at all, the metadata is rarely the issue. A file that stopped copying halfway has a valid header and nothing behind it, which looks identical to a working file until something tries to read further.
Run it through our checker to find out why a HEIC refuses to open, or drop it into the free HEIC viewer and see whether the picture comes up at all. Between them you will know whether you have a broken file or an unsupported one.
For JPEG, PNG, WebP and TIFF, the general-purpose EXIF viewer covers the same ground with a few extra fields those formats support.
Frequently asked questions
Why do most EXIF tools show nothing for a HEIC file?
They look in the wrong place. JPEG puts EXIF in a segment near the front of the file, so a reader can find it by walking a short list. HEIC stores it as an item inside the meta box, with its position recorded in a separate index. A tool written for JPEG finds no APP1 segment and reports an empty result rather than an error.
My photo has no GPS data but I never turned location off. Where did it go?
Something in the chain stripped it, and messaging apps are the usual culprit. Most re-encode images on send, which drops every metadata box as a side effect. AirDrop and iCloud sharing usually preserve it; WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram usually do not.
Does the capture time in the file account for time zones?
Not in the classic field. DateTimeOriginal is local wall-clock time with no zone attached, which is why a photo taken abroad reads as the local hour there. Newer iPhones also write an OffsetTimeOriginal field carrying the zone, but plenty of software still ignores it.
Can metadata tell me whether a photo was edited?
Sometimes, and never conclusively. The Software field often names the app that last wrote the file, so a photo showing an editor rather than a camera version has passed through one. Absence proves nothing — plenty of editors leave the field untouched or clear it entirely.
Why does my camera body serial number appear in a photo?
Many cameras write it, and it is worth understanding what that means. The serial links every photo from that body together, so a set of anonymous images can be tied to one owner if any single photo is ever traced. Phones generally do not write it; dedicated cameras often do.
Is the altitude figure in a photo accurate?
Treat it as a rough number. Phone altitude comes from GPS or barometric pressure, both of which drift by tens of metres in ordinary conditions. It is useful for telling a valley from a hilltop and useless for anything that needs precision.
Will reading metadata here change my original file?
No. We read the bytes and never write them. Your file on disk is untouched and we do not produce a modified copy. If you actually want the data gone, that is a separate deliberate step with our metadata remover.
What does the four-letter brand code next to my file mean?
It is the ftyp brand, the first thing a reader checks, and it names the flavour of the container. A code of heic means HEVC-compressed stills, heix means the ten-bit variant, and mif1 is generic HEIF that does not commit to a codec at all. It decides whether a given decoder will open your file.
Why do two photos taken seconds apart have different metadata?
Modes change what the camera records. A shot taken in Portrait or Night mode goes through extra processing and often ends up with different software tags and sometimes a different lens value than the frame before it. Burst frames can also share one timestamp across the whole burst.
Can I recover metadata that has already been stripped?
No, and nobody can. Stripping removes the bytes from the file, so there is nothing left to read. The only copies of that data are wherever the original still exists, which is usually the phone that took the photo.
Read it before you convert it
Every field this HEIC metadata viewer shows you disappears the moment the photo is converted to JPG or PNG. Decoding to a canvas keeps the pixels and drops everything else.
So read first. Note the capture time, check whether coordinates are attached, and decide whether you want them travelling with the file. Then convert, and do it knowing exactly what you are leaving behind.