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EXIF Metadata Viewer

Processed Client Side

See every piece of metadata hidden inside a photo — camera, lens, exposure, timestamps, GPS coordinates, and the embedded thumbnail. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded.

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About EXIF Metadata Viewer

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Whatever you paste is processed on your own device and is never uploaded, logged, or sent to any server.

Every photo a phone or camera takes carries a second file inside it — a block of metadata called Exif that records the camera and lens, the exposure the shot was made at, the exact second the shutter opened, the software that has touched the file since, and, on a phone with location services enabled, the latitude and longitude to within a few metres. This viewer decodes all of it in your browser and lays it out group by group: the file and container details, IFD0, the Exif sub-directory, GPS, the IPTC and XMP blocks that editing software writes, and the small JPEG thumbnail cameras embed for fast previewing. That thumbnail is worth knowing about on its own, because it is generated at capture and is not always regenerated when the image is edited — a cropped or retouched photo can still carry a thumbnail of the original frame. Everything is parsed from the raw bytes on your own machine; the file is never sent anywhere, which matters more for this tool than for most, since the whole point is to look at data you may not want a stranger to see.

Key features

  • Full Exif decode: IFD0, the Exif sub-IFD, GPS, interoperability, and the IFD1 thumbnail directory
  • Human-readable values — exposure as 1/250 s, aperture as f/1.8, orientation as "Rotated 90° CW", flash decoded from its bitfield
  • GPS coordinates converted from degrees-minutes-seconds to decimal, with altitude and a one-click map link
  • The embedded camera thumbnail extracted and shown next to the full image
  • IPTC captions, credits and copyright from the Photoshop block, plus the common XMP properties and the raw XMP packet
  • Container details for JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF, HEIC and AVIF — dimensions, bit depth, colour type, encoding, ICC profile, PNG text chunks
  • Identifying tags — serial numbers, owner name, GPS — flagged in the list, with a switch that redacts them from the export
  • Unrecognised tags shown by their hex ID rather than dropped, so manufacturer-private data is still visible
  • Export as aligned text, JSON, CSV, a Markdown table, or the raw XMP packet
  • Reads the file entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, and it works offline

How to use it

  1. Drop a photo onto the panel, or click to browse for one.
  2. Read the summary chips for the camera, lens, exposure and capture time at a glance.
  3. Scroll the grouped tag list, or type in the filter box to jump to a tag by name or value.
  4. If a GPS block is present, check the decoded coordinates and open the map link to see where the shot was taken.
  5. Pick an export format, turn on Redact GPS & serials if you are sharing the report, and copy or download it.

Tips & common mistakes

  • DateTimeOriginal is when the shutter fired; DateTime in IFD0 is when the file was last written by software. A gap between them means the file has been edited, and the size of the gap is often the more interesting fact.
  • Exif timestamps carry no time zone unless the camera wrote the OffsetTime tags, which most did not until around 2020. A 2015 photo timestamped 18:22 is local wall-clock time at an unknown offset — but GPSDateStamp and GPSTimeStamp are always UTC, so a photo with both lets you recover the offset.
  • The Software tag is the quiet giveaway on any image claimed to be straight out of camera. Lightroom, Photoshop, and phone editors all stamp it.
  • Orientation is why a photo can look correct in one app and sideways in another. The pixels are unrotated; the tag tells the viewer to rotate, and software that ignores it shows the raw frame.
  • A missing Exif block is not proof of anything. Every major social platform strips metadata on upload, so a downloaded image having none tells you where it has been, not what it was.
  • GPS accuracy varies more than the six decimal places suggest. A phone with a good fix is accurate to a few metres, one indoors or in a city canyon can be off by a block, and GPSHPositioningError records the camera's own estimate when it is present.
  • The embedded thumbnail can disagree with the image. Some editors update the full frame and leave IFD1 alone, so comparing the two is a quick check for a crop.
  • MakerNote is manufacturer-private and often the largest tag in the file, holding focus points, shutter count, and lens correction data in an undocumented layout. This tool reports its size rather than guessing at its contents.
  • If you need to publish a photo, read the metadata first and strip it second. Serial numbers, owner name, and GPS are the three that identify a person, and BodySerialNumber in particular has been used to tie anonymous images back to a photographer.
  • Screenshots have almost no metadata by design, and a screenshot of a photo has none of the original photo's. That is why re-photographing or screenshotting an image is an effective, if lossy, way to strip it.

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Frequently asked questions

12

Drop the photo onto the panel or click to browse for one. Every metadata tag in the file is decoded and grouped immediately — camera and lens, exposure settings, timestamps, GPS, IPTC and XMP — and you can copy or download the whole report.

No. The file is read as bytes and parsed entirely in your browser, so it never leaves your device. That matters here more than usual, because metadata often contains exactly the information you would not want to hand to a stranger.

If the camera recorded a GPS block, yes. The coordinates are converted from degrees-minutes-seconds to decimal, shown with the altitude, and linked to a map. Photos from cameras without GPS, and any photo downloaded from a social platform, will have no location at all.

JPEG, HEIC and HEIF, PNG, WebP, TIFF, GIF, AVIF, and BMP. JPEG and HEIC carry the richest camera metadata; PNG additionally exposes its text chunks, and WebP its EXIF and XMP chunks.

Almost every social platform and messaging app strips metadata when you upload, and screenshots never had any. Editing and exporting through some tools also drops it. A file with no Exif has usually passed through one of those, rather than never having had any.

DateTimeOriginal is when the shutter fired and does not change. DateTime in IFD0 is when software last wrote the file. If they differ, the photo has been edited, and the gap between them tells you how long after capture.

No. Every tag in it can be edited with ordinary tools, so metadata is evidence, not proof. What it is good for is the opposite direction: metadata that contradicts a claim — a Software tag on a supposedly untouched file, or a timestamp that does not fit — is a strong signal.

Cameras write a small JPEG preview into IFD1 so that image browsers can show a thumbnail without decoding the full frame. It is generated at capture, and some editors do not regenerate it, so a cropped photo can still carry a thumbnail of the original composition.

Re-encoding the image drops it — converting the photo with the Image Converter or Image Compressor on this site produces a file with the metadata gone, because the image is decoded to pixels and written out fresh. Turning on Redact GPS & serials here only affects the exported report, not the file itself.

GPS coordinates, BodySerialNumber and LensSerialNumber, OwnerName, Artist, and ImageUniqueID. Those are flagged in the tag list, and the redact switch replaces their values in whatever you export. Serial numbers in particular can tie separate anonymous photos to the same camera.

MakerNote is a manufacturer-private block with an undocumented, per-brand layout that holds things like focus points and shutter count. Reading it reliably means shipping a table for every camera model, so this tool reports that it is there and how large it is rather than guessing.

Yes. Once the page has loaded, all parsing happens locally, so the tool keeps working with no network connection. The only thing that needs the internet is the optional map link for GPS coordinates.