How to check a photo's EXIF metadata

A photo carries far more than what you can see in it. Camera model, exposure settings, the exact second it was taken, and often the GPS coordinates of where you were standing, all riding along in a block of data called EXIF. Here's how to check what yours are carrying, and what to do about it.

What EXIF metadata actually is

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. It's a standard, not a company's idea, published so that cameras, phones and photo software agree on where to store a fixed set of fields inside an image file. When your phone takes a photo, its camera app writes this block into the file alongside the pixels, before the file ever reaches your camera roll.

The fields cover three broad areas. Camera and lens, make, model, and the exposure triangle, aperture, shutter speed and ISO, that produced the shot. Timing and authorship, the exact capture date and time, the software last used to edit the file, and any author or copyright field. Location, GPS latitude, longitude and sometimes altitude, recorded at the moment of capture if your phone had location services turned on for the camera app.

None of it shows up when you simply look at the picture. That's the point of it, and also the reason it's worth checking before you assume a photo is exactly what it appears to be.

Why it's worth checking before you share a photo

The GPS field is the one that matters most, because most phones write it by default. A photo taken at home and posted publicly can hand over your address to anyone who knows to look, not through anything visible in the picture, through three numbers sitting in the file's metadata. A single photo rarely matters. A pattern of them, posted over weeks from the same few locations, quietly plots a map of exactly where you spend your time.

Timestamps carry a quieter version of the same risk. A capture date can contradict a caption, confirm you were somewhere you'd rather not have been placed, or simply reveal how often a listing's photos actually get updated. None of that is a problem most of the time. It becomes one the moment a photo ends up somewhere you didn't expect, a resale marketplace, a dating profile, a public forum thread.

Checking isn't only about risk. The same fields let you confirm a photo's real capture date before trusting it in a dispute, verify which settings actually produced a shot you liked, or check whether a platform already stripped a file's metadata before you post it somewhere that expects clean files. Reading the metadata is the only way to know, one way or the other, rather than guess.

Where this actually comes up

Real estate and rental listings are the clearest case. A photographer walks through a property and uploads photos before the listing is public, and each one can carry the exact coordinates of a home that hasn't been announced yet. Marketplace resale listings do the same thing quietly, a photo of an item taken on a kitchen counter can carry the seller's address along with it.

Lost pet and missing item posts are usually shared in a hurry, with good intentions and no thought given to what the photo is also carrying. Dating and social profiles are the slow version of the same problem, a run of casual selfies taken at home, each one adding the same coordinates to a public profile without anyone deciding that on purpose.

It cuts the other way too. Journalism and content moderation both rely on checking a submitted photo's real capture date and, where present, its location, to confirm whether footage actually shows what it claims to show. Reading metadata is how that gets verified rather than assumed.

How to check a photo's metadata in your browser

Open the EXIF viewer and drop a photo onto the page, or select one or more files, up to 200 at once. The tags it finds are decoded and shown immediately underneath, camera and lens first, then exposure, then dates, then GPS if the file carries it.

This happens entirely on your device. The file is read by the browser tab, the tags are decoded in memory, and nothing is sent anywhere. You can check that claim rather than take it on trust, load the page, disconnect from the internet, and read a photo's metadata anyway. It still works, because everything the page needs was already downloaded before you dropped the file.

If GPS coordinates are present, the tool shows a plain 'View on OpenStreetMap' link rather than an embedded map. Clicking it opens the exact coordinates in a new tab. Nothing is fetched or sent anywhere until you actually click it, so simply reading a file's metadata never pings a mapping service on your behalf.

Checking a whole folder before a big upload works the same way as checking one file, drop the batch in together and each photo's readout appears under its own name, so you can scan a hundred files for a stray GPS tag as quickly as you'd check one.

What each field means, and how to read it

Camera make and model are self-explanatory. The exposure triangle is three numbers that together decide how bright and how sharp a shot turns out. Aperture is an f-number, a smaller number means a wider opening and more light. Shutter speed is how long the sensor was exposed, a fraction of a second for anything handheld. ISO is the sensor's sensitivity, higher numbers mean more grain in exchange for a usable shot in low light.

Capture and modification timestamps are usually close together for an untouched photo and further apart once something has edited it. The software field, when present, names whatever last wrote to the file, which can be the phone's own camera app, or an editor if the photo has been through one since.

GPS is stored as decimal latitude and longitude, sometimes with an altitude in metres. Read on their own they're just two numbers, which is exactly why the map link matters, it turns three digits most people can't picture into an actual spot on a map with one click.

The author or copyright field, when present, names whoever the camera or an editing app was told owns the shot. It matters most when you're the one reusing someone else's photo, a downloaded image, a screenshot passed around a group chat, checking it before you reuse it can save you from an entirely avoidable dispute over a photo you assumed was free to use.

Which file formats carry EXIF, and which never do

JPG has carried EXIF since the format's earliest days, and it's still where you'll find the richest set of fields, because it's what nearly every camera and phone writes to by default. HEIC, AVIF and WebP all carry the same data, stored in a different container but readable the same way. PNG can carry it too, through a dedicated block added to the PNG standard, but comparatively few encoders actually write one, so a PNG with genuine EXIF is the exception rather than the rule.

GIF, BMP, ICO and SVG have no standard place to store this kind of data at all. It isn't that they hide it, there's simply no field defined for a camera to write into, which is why checking one of those always comes back empty.

One fact worth knowing if you use this site's converters, turning a photo into a different format builds a new file from the decoded pixels, so none of the original metadata carries over, GPS included. That's a side effect of how conversion works here, not a setting you choose, and it means converting a photo is itself a way of stripping its metadata, just not always a deliberate one.

Checking, removing and redacting are three different jobs

The EXIF viewer only reads. Whatever you drop in comes back, if you download it, byte-for-byte identical to what you dropped. It exists purely to show you what's already there before you decide what to do about it.

The metadata remover does the next step, stripping EXIF, GPS and the other fields out of a JPG or PNG without touching a single pixel, so the picture looks identical and the file that started the conversation no longer carries the data. Reach for this once you've checked a file and decided it's carrying something you don't want to pass on.

Neither one touches what's actually visible in the frame. A face, a number plate, a street sign in the background, none of that is metadata, it's pixels, and no amount of stripping fields removes it. That's a separate job, handled by redact and blur, which lets you draw a box over whatever's in the shot itself before you share it.

A checklist before you post or send a photo

Run it through the EXIF viewer first if you're not sure what it's carrying, particularly for anything taken at home, at work, or anywhere you wouldn't want pinned on a map. If GPS is present and you don't want it going with the photo, strip it with the metadata remover before you post or send the file, not after. Check the capture timestamp if the photo's date matters to whoever's receiving it, a mismatch is often the first thing a skeptical reader checks. And if there's a face, a plate, or an address visible in the shot itself, remember that's a pixel problem the metadata tools can't touch, redact it separately if it needs covering.

If GPS in your own photos is a bigger concern than any single upload, turn it off at the source. On both iPhone and Android, the setting lives under the camera app's own location permission, roughly Settings, then Privacy, then Location Services, then Camera on an iPhone, and Settings, then Apps, then Camera, then Permissions, then Location on most Android phones, exact wording varies by device. That changes what new photos carry going forward. It does nothing for photos already taken, so anything already on your phone still needs checking individually with the tool above.

None of this needs an account, an upload, or a wait. Every one of these tools runs in the same tab, on the same device, on the photo you already have open, and none of them send anything anywhere unless you click a link that says so.

Quick questions

Tools

• EXIF viewer, see camera, exposure and GPS data before you decide what to do with a photo
• Remove metadata & GPS, strip location data and camera info before sharing
• Redact & blur, hide a face, plate or address before you share a photo