Photo metadata viewer — read EXIF data from any JPEG or PNG

What a photo file actually stores — the full field list

JPEG and PNG files are not just pixels. Both formats reserve space for structured metadata that records how, when, and where the image was produced. JPEG uses an EXIF header — a compact binary block written by the camera or editing app at the moment of export. PNG carries the same data in text chunks labelled tEXt or eXIf. Either way, the information travels with the file through every share, download, and re-upload unless something explicitly removes it.

The six categories below account for the fields most people encounter when they open a file in a metadata viewer. There are over two hundred defined EXIF tags in the specification; most files carry a subset of thirty to sixty of them.

How to read what the viewer finds

The viewer groups tags into sections — Camera, Exposure, Location, Time, Software — so you can scan for the category you care about rather than reading a raw tag dump. A green GPS row means coordinates are present; a grey "not found" row means the field is absent in this file.

Pay attention to the Software tag before drawing conclusions. An editing app rewrites it when it re-saves the file, which means a camera photo processed in Lightroom shows "Lightroom" rather than the original camera firmware. That is normal workflow behaviour, not a forgery signal. An AI generator typically writes its own product name into the same field — which is a more meaningful marker.

Five real scenarios where viewing metadata first saves time

Buying a second-hand camera body: the seller claims low shutter count. Ask for a sample photo, drop it into the viewer, and check the Make and Model tag. If the camera model in the EXIF does not match the listing, the photos are not from that body.

Investigating a suspicious press photo: a viral news image carries a capture timestamp three days before the event it supposedly shows. Reading the DateTimeOriginal field in a viewer takes ten seconds and is enough to raise a factual question that deeper investigation can answer.

Editing your own archive: you shot the same location three times across two cameras and a phone. Sorting by camera model in the EXIF block lets you batch-process each camera's files with the right colour profile instead of inspecting every filename.

Preparing photos for a freelance portfolio: before sharing a client's product shot, check that it does not carry the studio address in the GPS field or a serial number that traces back to your equipment list. Checking first means you choose what to share rather than discovering the leak after the fact.

Verifying a claimed location in user-generated content: a photo posted to a community forum claims to show flooding in a specific district. The GPS field puts it eighty kilometres away. That discrepancy is not proof of deception — GPS can be wrong, and platforms strip it — but it is the right question to ask before amplifying the post.

Four mistakes people make when checking photo metadata

Treating a missing EXIF block as proof the photo is fake. Every major social platform strips metadata on upload. A blank viewer result is almost always a social platform or messaging app, not an attempt to hide something. Read absence as a routing signal, not a conclusion.

Trusting the camera model field uncritically. EXIF is not signed or verified. Any tool that can write a file can write whatever it wants into the Make and Model fields. The field is useful when it matches other evidence; it is not an authentication certificate on its own.

Assuming that stripping metadata removes all identifying information. EXIF is one layer. The pixel content itself — a recognisable face, a licence plate, a distinctive building — remains after the metadata is gone. Clearing metadata lowers the machine-readable trail; it does not anonymise the image.

Forgetting that the thumbnail inside the file is separate from the main image. JPEG files often carry an embedded low-resolution preview in the EXIF block. If you edit the main pixels but do not regenerate the thumbnail, the original unedited version survives inside the same file. Some viewers expose this; many do not.

What PNG metadata looks like versus JPEG

JPEG stores EXIF as a compact binary block in the APP1 segment near the start of the file. The structure is defined, well-documented, and readable by almost every metadata library. PNG uses a looser text-chunk model. Metadata may sit in tEXt chunks (plain ASCII key-value pairs), in iTXt chunks (UTF-8 with optional compression), or in an eXIf chunk that embeds a full EXIF block inside the PNG container. A file exported from Photoshop, Lightroom, or a mobile camera app will often carry all three.

AI generators that output PNG frequently write their own product name into a tEXt chunk under the key "Software" or a generator-specific key. That is the most reliable file-level fingerprint available on PNG-format generated images — more reliable than checking dimensions, because canvas sizes overlap with legitimate photography.

Privacy: why nothing is uploaded

This viewer uses the File API to read your image directly into browser memory. The EXIF parser runs as JavaScript in your tab and returns the tag list without any network request. You can verify this by opening the browser's network panel (F12 → Network) and watching for outbound requests after you drop a file: there are none.

That matters because the fields this tool reads — GPS coordinates, capture time, device serial number — are exactly the fields you might not want a third party to collect. Sending the file to a server to read its metadata creates the same risk as sending the metadata directly. Local processing avoids that entirely. If you want to confirm the GPS block is gone after stripping, re-run the viewer: the GPS remover on this site also runs locally, so that workflow never sends your location data over a network.

How this viewer differs from the other tools on this site

The AI-generation checker also reads EXIF, but its focus is narrow: it looks for generator fingerprints, provenance boxes, and canvas dimensions that match AI defaults. This viewer is broader — it shows you the complete tag set so you can answer any question about the file, not just the AI-origin question.

The metadata remover strips rather than reads. The typical workflow is: view first, decide what you want gone, then strip. Running the viewer after a strip confirms the operation worked — if a field you targeted still appears, the stripping step did not clear it and you should repeat with a different method.

For GPS specifically, the GPS remover removes only the location cluster and leaves camera and exposure fields intact. Useful when you want to keep shooting parameters for post-processing reference but share a location-free copy.

What exactly lives inside an EXIF block — the full breakdown

Most people know EXIF stores "the camera model and GPS," but the actual tag list is longer and more specific than that. Here is what you will actually find when you open a raw EXIF dump:

Camera and lens identity. The Make and Model tags give the manufacturer and device name — "Apple / iPhone 15 Pro" or "NIKON CORPORATION / NIKON Z8." LensModel adds the specific optic: "NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S." On a phone, this is the logical camera name the OS reports, not a serial number. On a DSLR or mirrorless, some bodies also write BodySerialNumber and LensSerialNumber, which tie the file permanently to specific pieces of hardware.

Exposure triangle: ISO, shutter, aperture. ISOSpeedRatings, ExposureTime (expressed as a fraction, e.g. 1/320 s), and FNumber (e.g. 2.8) are the three you will recognise from any photography course. They are stored as rational numbers — pairs of integers — so a viewer that shows "f/2.8" is dividing 28 by 10 from the raw tag. FocalLength and FocalLengthIn35mmFilm complete the picture for anyone doing post-processing comparisons across bodies.

Capture time and time zone. DateTimeOriginal records the moment the shutter opened, formatted as "YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS" — note the colons in the date, which is non-standard ISO 8601 and trips up some parsers. OffsetTimeOriginal, added in EXIF 2.31, records the UTC offset ("+08:00"), which finally lets you reconstruct an unambiguous UTC timestamp. Older files often lack this tag entirely, making the time zone ambiguous without a GPS cross-reference.

GPS cluster. GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude are stored as three rational numbers each — degrees, minutes, and seconds — paired with GPSLatitudeRef ("N" or "S") and GPSLongitudeRef ("E" or "W"). GPSAltitude adds elevation in metres above sea level. GPSHPositioningError (or GPSPDop on older firmware) gives the horizontal accuracy estimate; on a modern iPhone in good conditions this is typically 3–5 metres. GPSSpeed and GPSImgDirection are also common on phone photos — the first tells you how fast the device was moving, the second which compass direction the camera was pointing.

Orientation tag and the classic rotation bug. Orientation is a single integer from 1 to 8 that tells a viewer how to rotate the image before displaying it. Value 1 means "already upright, display as-is." Values 3, 6, and 8 mean 180°, 90° clockwise, and 90° counter-clockwise respectively. The bug that has confused developers for decades: many image editors and CMS platforms read the pixel data but ignore the Orientation tag, so a portrait photo shot on a phone appears sideways in the browser. The fix is to apply the rotation and strip the tag, or to use a library that respects it. If you have ever uploaded a photo that displayed correctly on your phone but appeared rotated on a website, this is why.

Privacy risk levels — a graded view

Not all EXIF fields carry the same exposure risk. The table below grades them by realistic harm, not theoretical worst-case:

The jump from "high" to "critical" happens when photos are aggregated, not when a single image is shared. A real-estate agent posting a portfolio of twenty property photos taken on the same phone is leaking a travel map whether or not they intend to. The fix is the same in both cases: strip the GPS cluster before sharing.

Which social platforms actually remove your metadata — and which ones don't

The short answer: most major platforms strip GPS on upload, but the behaviour varies, sometimes changes, and does not apply to every sharing method.

Instagram and Facebook both process uploaded photos through a compression pipeline that drops GPS coordinates. They typically retain a reduced EXIF block — camera model and sometimes a timestamp — but location data is gone by the time anyone else can download the file. This has been their documented behaviour for years, though the specifics of what remains can change with platform updates.

X (Twitter) has historically been less aggressive about stripping EXIF. Reports from security researchers over the years found that GPS coordinates survived photo uploads on X in some configurations — particularly when images were downloaded via the API rather than the web viewer. This is worth noting as a cautionary pattern: do not rely on a platform to protect your location data; strip it before you upload.

Email attachments. No stripping happens. If you attach a JPEG to a Gmail or Outlook message and the recipient saves it, they have every tag the file carried when you attached it — GPS, timestamp, device serial, all of it.

WeChat "original image" mode. When you send a photo in WeChat without choosing "original quality," the app re-compresses it and drops most metadata. But if the sender explicitly taps the "original" switch, the file is transmitted as-is, metadata intact. Many users tap original quality to preserve resolution without realising they are also preserving location data.

The practical rule: assume nothing is stripped until you verify it yourself. Use this viewer on a downloaded copy of what you shared to confirm what survived.

The four-step workflow: view, judge, strip, re-verify

Viewing metadata and then doing nothing with the result is only half the job. Here is a repeatable process that takes under two minutes per file:

Step 1 — View. Drop the file into this viewer. Note which fields are present. Pay specific attention to the GPS row and the DateTimeOriginal row.

Step 2 — Judge. Ask: does this file need to go somewhere public or semi-public? If yes, does the metadata in it reveal something you did not intend to share — a home location, a precise time you were somewhere, a device serial that links this photo to your other photos?

Step 3 — Strip selectively or fully. If you only want to remove coordinates, use the GPS remover — it leaves the rest of the EXIF intact so you keep shooting parameters and timestamps. If you want everything gone, use the image metadata stripper or the full metadata remover, which clears EXIF, XMP, and IPTC in one pass. Both run locally — no upload.

Step 4 — Re-verify. Drop the processed file back into this viewer. If GPS coordinates still show, the strip did not work — this can happen when metadata is embedded in an ICC profile or a non-standard chunk. Try again with a different tool or export method.

Frequently asked questions

Can I view metadata from a screenshot the same way I view it from a camera photo?

Usually, but with less useful data. A screenshot taken on a phone or computer typically carries a DateTimeOriginal (when the screenshot was taken), the device model, and sometimes the OS version in the Software tag. It will not have GPS or lens data because a screenshot is not a camera capture. The viewer will parse whatever tags the OS wrote, which varies by platform and iOS / Android version. If you want to check whether a screenshot has AI-generation markers rather than device EXIF, the AI-generation checker is the more relevant tool.

Does viewing a file in this tool change or damage it in any way?

No. Reading is read-only. The viewer parses the EXIF block from the copy of the file loaded into your browser's memory — it does not modify the original file on disk, does not re-encode the pixels, and does not write any tags. The file on your drive is identical after viewing. Only the stripping and removal tools write a new file, and they produce a separate download rather than overwriting the original.

My file shows "no metadata found" — does that mean it has been edited or faked?

Almost certainly not. The most common reason for an empty EXIF result is that the file was downloaded from a social platform that strips metadata on upload — Instagram, Facebook, and most messaging apps do this by default. Screenshots also often carry minimal EXIF. A blank result is normal and expected for any image that passed through a stripping pipeline. It becomes suspicious only when combined with other inconsistencies — for example, a claimed RAW export from a camera that carries no EXIF at all, or a file with pixel dimensions that do not match any sensor the listed camera model has ever shipped.