EXIF Viewer — See Photo Metadata

You posted a dusk skyline to a photography group and someone typed the eternal question: gorgeous — what settings? You honestly do not remember. It was eleven months ago, you were cold, and the histogram was doing something alarming. The answer is not in your memory. It is in the file. Every photo your camera writes carries its own biography — shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length, the exact second the shutter fired — and reading that biography is a two-second operation once you know where to look.

The same panel has a second column, and that is where this stops being a photography conversation. If the photo came from a phone with location services on, the metadata includes GPS coordinates accurate enough to resolve to a street address, the altitude, the compass heading of the lens, and the date and time. Photographers discover this the way most people discover it: by dropping their own file into a viewer out of curiosity and feeling the floor tilt slightly when a map pin appears.

This page is that viewer, built to be the fast, private version of the operation. Drop a photo, see everything the file says about you and your camera, decide what happens next. What follows is a tour of what the metadata actually contains, how its strange 1990s encoding works, how to convert GPS tags into places, what metadata cannot prove, and who reads it on purpose. The companion EXIF Remover is the second half of the habit this page starts.

The viewer's panel is organized the way the file is organized — a handful of sections that mirror the directories inside the metadata block. Camera and shot settings sit at the top: make, model, lens, focal length, exposure program, shutter as a fraction, aperture as an f-number, ISO, metering mode, flash status. Dates follow, including the distinction that matters to archivists between the moment the shutter fired and the moment the file was last modified.

If location data exists, it gets its own clearly marked section, because a GPS block deserves to be visible rather than buried in row forty of a tag dump. Coordinates appear in the standard degrees-minutes-seconds form with the hemisphere reference, alongside a decimal conversion you can paste into any mapping service. And beneath the standard tags, when a manufacturer wrote proprietary MakerNotes, the viewer lists whatever it can decode of them — the section where shutter counts, focus points and other brand secrets live.

Parsing itself is handled by exifr, an open-source JavaScript EXIF library that reads files directly in the browser. It supports the standard block, the GPS directory, MakerNotes for many brands, XMP and IPTC where present, and files from most camera ecosystems including phone HEIC. The choice of library matters less than the choice of location: the parsing happens on your machine, which is the entire difference between inspecting a file and broadcasting it.

No settings required, no account, nothing to configure before the first look. The flow below covers the standard inspection; the tool above this section is live, so you can follow along with any photo you own.

1. 1

   Drop the photo in

   Drag a JPG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP or PNG file onto the target zone. The file opens into browser memory and parsing starts immediately — no upload, no progress bar, because there is nowhere for it to progress to.

2. 2

   Scan the camera section

   Make, model, lens and the exposure triangle appear first. This is the part photographers came for: the truth about how a shot was actually taken rather than how it is remembered.

3. 3

   Check the location section carefully

   If GPS data is present, it is shown prominently with a warning color. Coordinates, altitude, heading and the satellite timestamp appear together, because they leak together.

4. 4

   Look at the dates

   The capture timestamp is the interesting one — and note the format: colons in the date are standard EXIF, not a display bug.

5. 5

   Browse MakerNotes if present

   Proprietary entries appear decoded where the library supports them. Shutter count lives here on some brands, which is why used-camera buyers run this step before negotiating.

6. 6

   Decide what to do next

   Metadata you did not expect is a signal. The EXIF Remover one page over re-encodes the photo with nothing attached, and the two tools together form the check-then-clean habit.

A raw tag dump is hexadecimal IDs and rational numbers — accurate, and about as readable as a tax return. Here is the same information the way a photographer or a curious owner actually uses it.

One entry deserves special attention because it is the tag people are most often surprised a camera records at all: the body serial number. Combined with warranty registration, a serial can connect an anonymous photo to the person who registered the device. Wildlife photographers and photojournalists have both learned to treat it as identifying information.

A tag dump tells you what the camera did; interpretation tells you why, and the why is the free lesson. Shutter speed reads against motion: a quarter of a second is tripod territory, 1/125 freezes a walking person, and the classic rule of thumb — one over the focal length — says a 50mm lens wants at least 1/50 handheld on a full-frame body. When your dusk skyline shows 1/40 and the buildings are sharp, something was braced. When it shows 1/8 and the lights trail like comets, you found the effect on purpose or got lucky, and the metadata remembers which.

Aperture reads against depth of field and light: f/1.8 is a razor plane with a flood of photons, f/11 keeps a whole table in focus and demands a hundred times more light or time to compensate. ISO reads against desperation — a clean ISO 100 shot and a gritty ISO 6400 shot of the same scene tell the story of available light better than any recollection. Put the three together with the focal length and the time of day, and every keeper in your library becomes a small, dated experiment with its results attached.

This is also how the viewer earns its keep for learners: pick your ten favorite photos you did not take — a friend's, a stranger's from a shared album with original files — read their settings, and reverse-engineer the decisions. Photography instruction has moved into the metadata, because the camera has been annotating the answers all along.

EXIF dates back to an era when camera firmware had no floating-point unit and no appetite for text parsing, and it shows. Numbers are stored as rationals — a numerator and denominator as two integers — so f/2.8 is the fraction 28 over 10 and a 1/250-second shutter is literally 1 over 250. GPS coordinates follow the same pattern: 34/1, 3/1, 815/100 for thirty-four degrees, three minutes, eight and fifteen hundredths seconds.

The embedded structure is a TIFF file, and TIFF headers announce their byte order with two literal letters: 'II' for little-endian (Intel convention) and 'MM' for big-endian (Motorola convention), followed by the magic number 42. Yes, forty-two — the specification's authors had a sense of humor or a Hitchhiker's Guide habit, and every EXIF parser on earth now checks for it. Cameras from different manufacturers write different byte orders, so the viewer normalizes whichever it finds.

Timestamps have their own quirk: the standard's fixed format is YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS, colons included. Every few months a programmer writes date-parsing code that assumes slashes, ships it, and then discovers photos from the last three decades separating their fields with punctuation that belongs in a clock. The viewer handles it; your spreadsheet import might not.

The GPS directory stores coordinates as degrees, minutes and seconds with hemisphere letters, because that is how nautical tradition wrote positions and the camera industry inherited it. Mapping services want decimal degrees, and the conversion is arithmetic you can do on a receipt: divide the minutes by 60, the seconds by 3600, and add all three parts. South latitudes and west longitudes carry a negative sign.

Read that example again with a specific photo in mind: one you took at home. Consumer GPS is accurate to a few meters, and phones opportunistically improve on that using Wi-Fi positioning. The coordinates in a bedroom photo do not describe a neighborhood; they describe a room. This is why the location section of the viewer is styled like a warning rather than a fun fact.

The Orientation tag (0x0112) is a single integer from 1 to 8 telling software how to rotate the pixels for display, and it exists because cameras keep their sensors fixed and simply record which way the device was held. Value 1 is normal; values 6 and 8 mean rotate a quarter-turn clockwise or counter-clockwise; 3 means upside down; the odd values 2, 4, 5 and 7 add mirroring for the front camera's psychological comfort.

The tag is why photos sometimes appear sideways in software that ignores it and correct in software that respects it — and why stripping metadata is safe for orientation on this site: modern browsers apply the flag while decoding, so the pixels come out upright before any re-encode begins. The flag's work is already done by the time you would delete it. Twenty years of sideways photos in email attachments were, in the end, a bug in readers, not in cameras.

A complete EXIF panel feels like proof of something, and it is worth being precise about what it proves: nothing. Metadata is ordinary data, editable by any tool in the ecosystem — ExifTool, the reference program for the field, rewrites tags as casually as a text editor rewrites sentences. A timestamp proves only that someone wanted that timestamp to be there. This is why metadata evidence in serious contexts is treated as a lead, never as a verdict.

• Clocks lie: cameras set to the wrong time zone or year produce confident, wrong timestamps
• Exports clean: Lightroom exports and web compressors routinely write files with no metadata at all
• Screenshots have none: the operating system is the camera, and it records nothing about settings it does not have
• Generated images often carry no camera metadata — increasingly relevant in an era of synthetic photos
• Provenance is arriving, slowly: the C2PA standard adds cryptographically signed capture and edit history, but adoption is still young

The practical reading: when a file's metadata agrees with its context, believe it as much as you believed it before you checked. When it disagrees — a 2019 timestamp on a photo of a 2023 product launch, a 6 AM capture time on a sunset — you have found something interesting, and interesting is where verification starts rather than where it ends.

Photographers are the obvious constituency, and not only beginners. Working shooters check their own files to reconstruct how a session was lit; landscape photographers compare ISO and shutter between keepers and rejects to learn what their tolerance actually was. The viewer turns every photo into a free lesson, because the camera graded its own work in advance.

Used-gear buyers make up the second crowd. A camera's shutter count, when the MakerNotes expose it, is the odometer of the body — the difference between a shutter with 8,000 actuations and one with 180,000 is the difference between years of service left and a repair bill waiting for its moment. Estate-sale resellers, camera-shop staff and forum traders all run this check before money changes hands.

Then there are the archivists digitizing family collections — dates in the metadata rescue photos whose backs were never labeled — and the growing crowd who arrived here through privacy rather than photography: people checking what their phone wrote before a photo goes to a marketplace, a dating app, or a neighborhood group. For them the next stop is usually the Image to Text Converter (OCR) for the backs of scanned prints, or the Image Compressor once files are ready to share.

The old way was a command line; the dangerous way was an upload site; the limited way is the operating system's property panel. The fast way is a local browser parse.

The upload-based viewers deserve their row in the table because they still rank well in search results, and their privacy story is exactly backwards for the job: the file you are inspecting for leaks gets uploaded to an unknown server in order to inspect it. If a metadata viewer ever asks you to wait for an upload, that is not a viewer — that is a collection point.

The architecture is worth one explicit paragraph because the tool's whole value depends on it. Your photo is handed by the browser's File API straight to the exifr parser, which runs as ordinary JavaScript on this page. The tags are rendered into the panel you see. At no point does a byte of the file travel across the network, and at no point is a copy retained — refresh the page and the inspection never happened, as far as anything outside your machine is concerned.

That read-only property carries a second guarantee worth naming: the viewer cannot damage a file it never writes. Originals stay original in your downloads folder, which matters when the file in question is a keeper or, occasionally, evidence.

The natural pairing is viewer-then-remover: see what a file carries, strip what should not travel, and share without the asterisk. Beyond that, the Image to Text Converter (OCR) rescues handwritten dates from scanned prints, and the Image Compressor finishes files for email or web once their secrets have been dealt with.