Image Metadata Viewer

See what your photos are carrying. Drop in an image and the page reads its EXIF data and shows the camera, exposure and location information embedded in the file — including the GPS coordinates that most people never realise are there.

The Data Your Camera Writes Into Every Photo

Exchangeable image file format is a block of structured data written into the file when the picture is taken, and it survives editing, messaging and uploading more often than people expect. It records the camera, the lens, the exposure triangle, the timestamp and, if the device had location services enabled, the coordinates where the shutter fired. The page parses that block directly from the bytes of the file.

• Basic details are shown for every supported image: filename, format, pixel dimensions and the aspect ratio derived from them.
• The full EXIF block is parsed for JPEG files, covering camera identification, exposure settings, timestamps and location.
• Results can be exported as JSON or CSV, or copied to the clipboard as text, which is useful when you need the settings for a bug report or a support thread.
• Everything happens in the browser. The file is read locally, and no copy is transmitted anywhere.

Reading a File

1. Drop an image onto the page or click the drop zone to choose one. JPEG gives the fullest result; PNG and WebP show dimensions and format only.
2. Wait for the parse to finish. Large JPEG files take a moment because the whole metadata block is walked entry by entry rather than skimmed.
3. Read the basic panel first — it always has something to report — then the EXIF section underneath if your file has one.
4. Look specifically at the location section if it is present. A latitude and longitude pair means the file knows where it was taken, and that information travels with the file.
5. Export using the JSON button if you need the values in another tool, or the copy button if you are pasting them into a message.

What a File With No Metadata Looks Like

Not every photo carries EXIF, and the way the page reports an empty block is deliberate rather than an error. Loading a 512 by 512 JPEG that has been through an image processing step returns filename, type, dimensions of 512 by 512 and an aspect ratio of 1.00, with the status reading no EXIF.

• A missing block is normal for anything that has been resized, re-encoded, screenshotted or shared through a platform that strips metadata. It does not mean the file is damaged.
• The dimensions and format still come from the image header itself, which is separate from EXIF and is why they are always available.
• Social platforms strip metadata at different rates. A photo sent through a messaging app often arrives clean, while the same photo attached to an email may retain everything.
• Screenshots carry no camera EXIF at all, because there was no camera involved. They may still carry software and timestamp fields.
• If you expected GPS data and the section is absent, the reason is almost always that the file has been through one of those steps rather than that the viewer missed it.

Which Fields Are Read

The parser walks the JPEG marker structure to find the application segment that holds the metadata, checks the signature, then reads two directories — the main image directory and a nested one for camera-specific fields — plus a third for location if it exists. The tags it recognises are:

• Camera identity: Make, Model, Software, Artist and Copyright.
• Exposure: ExposureTime, FNumber, ExposureProgram, ISOSpeedRatings and FocalLength, plus LensModel where the lens reports it.
• Timestamps: DateTime, DateTimeOriginal and DateTimeDigitized. These are separate fields and are often different values, since one records when the file was written and another when the photo was taken.
• Geometry: Orientation, XResolution, YResolution and the recorded pixel dimensions.
• Location: LatitudeRef, Latitude, LongitudeRef, Longitude, AltitudeRef and Altitude, read from the dedicated location directory.
• Rational values such as exposure time and aperture are stored as two integers and are divided and rounded to three decimal places for display, so a shutter speed shown as 0.008 is a rounded representation of the underlying fraction.
• Text fields stop at the first null byte and are capped at 128 characters, and array-valued fields are capped at 32 entries. Both limits exist to keep a malformed file from producing an unbounded list.

The Privacy Question, Which Is the Real Reason to Look

Metadata is how a photograph taken at home ends up telling a stranger where home is. This is not hypothetical — it has been the mechanism behind a number of well-publicised cases, and the exposure is systematic rather than accidental.

• The location block records coordinates to several decimal places, which is enough to identify a specific building rather than a neighbourhood.
• The timestamp records when the shutter fired, which combined with location tells anyone who has the file exactly where you were and when. It is the pairing that matters, not either field alone.
• Photo-sharing sites often strip this data on upload, but not all of them, and not consistently. Email attachments, cloud storage links and direct file transfers do not strip anything.
• Check before you publish. Reading the metadata first is a ten-second habit that removes the risk entirely, and it applies to images you are sending to someone privately as much as to ones you post.
• Stripping metadata is a separate operation from viewing it. This page reads and reports; it does not modify your file, so nothing is removed by looking.

Metadata Questions

Why does my photo show no EXIF data?

Because it has almost certainly been removed before it reached you. Resizing, re-encoding, screenshots and most social platform uploads discard the block. It is also possible the device never wrote one — some cameras in low-power modes and some screenshot tools do not. The viewer reports what is in the file, and an empty file is a real and common result rather than a failure.

Does it work with PNG or WebP files?

Those formats load and report their dimensions, format and aspect ratio, but the deeper camera fields are not read from them. The metadata structures differ enough between formats that supporting each properly is a separate piece of work, and the current parser reads the JPEG segment format. For most people the file they care about is a JPEG straight from a phone or camera, which is exactly where the interesting fields live.

Is my image uploaded to read the metadata?

No. The file is read by the browser and the metadata block is parsed from those bytes in memory. There is no upload, no server-side processing and no temporary file. This matters more here than for most tools, because a photo with GPS data in it is precisely the kind of file you would not want to hand to an unknown server.

Can this tool remove the metadata for me?

No, and that limitation is deliberate. This page only reports what is there, so you can decide what to do about it. Removing metadata is a destructive edit and belongs in a tool that says so clearly and makes the consequence obvious. A viewer that silently rewrote your file would be a bad viewer.

Last verified: October 3, 2026

Launch Image Metadata Viewer

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Maintained by Huang Bin · Last updated October 3, 2026