Image Metadata Viewer
Read EXIF camera, exposure and GPS tags from JPEG, PNG and WebP, and save a copy with the metadata removed.
Image Metadata Viewer workspace
Settings
Select or drop an image file
Preview
No image uploaded yet
Using Image Metadata Viewer
Load an image. The container is detected from its magic bytes rather than its file extension.
Read the camera, lens, exposure, date and orientation tags, plus any embedded text.
Look for the location warning, which appears whenever GPS coordinates are present.
Download a plain-text report of everything found, or a stripped copy with the metadata removed.
The reader parses TIFF image file directories in either byte order, following the pointers from IFD0 into the Exif and GPS directories, and reaches them through whichever container the file uses. Stripping rebuilds a JPEG or PNG without its metadata segments rather than re-encoding it, so no image quality is spent on privacy.
What Your Photographs Say About You
Every photograph a camera writes carries a second document beside the pixels: when it was taken, what took it, how the exposure was set, and often exactly where you stood. This page reads that document out of the raw bytes, and can remove it without disturbing a pixel.
The structure, briefly
EXIF borrows its layout from TIFF. A short header names the byte order, followed by a chain of image file directories, each a list of entries holding a tag number, a data type, a count, and either a small value inline or a pointer to a larger one.
The first directory holds the basics — make, model, orientation, timestamp — and pointers inside it lead to the Exif sub-directory with the exposure fields and to a GPS directory. Both byte orders and all twelve TIFF data types are handled, so files from different manufacturers read here rather than only little-endian ones.
Where the block hides
JPEG
Inside an APP1 marker segment near the front of the file, identified by the ASCII string Exif and two zero bytes. The marker chain is walked until that segment appears, and stops at the start of the compressed scan, since nothing past there is metadata.
PNG
PNG has no EXIF segment by tradition; it has chunks. tEXt and iTXt carry key and value text such as software names and comments, tIME carries the modification date, pHYs carries a pixel density that converts to DPI, and the newer eXIf chunk carries a whole TIFF block, parsed with the same code as the JPEG one.
WebP
An extended WebP file is a RIFF container of chunks, one of which may be named EXIF and hold the same TIFF payload. Encoders disagree about prefixing it with the Exif header, so both layouts are accepted.
GIF, HEIC and AVIF
GIF holds no camera metadata, but its frame blocks are counted so an animated file can be flagged — a browser canvas only ever sees the first frame. HEIC and AVIF keep their metadata in ISO-BMFF boxes that browsers do not expose to scripts, so the container is named and the limitation stated.
What is surfaced
Camera make and model, lens make and model, the software that last wrote the file, artist and copyright, orientation in words instead of a bare number, capture and digitisation timestamps, shutter speed as a fraction of a second, aperture as an f-number, ISO, focal length with its 35 mm equivalent, exposure compensation, whether the flash fired, and the recorded pixel dimensions.
When a file carries none of it, the answer given is "no EXIF data found" — a real result rather than an error, and the normal one for screenshots, design exports and anything that has passed through a social platform.
The coordinates are the part that matters
Where a GPS directory exists, its degrees, minutes and seconds become decimal, signed by the north/south and east/west references, and shown with a warning attached.
Six decimal places of latitude resolve to about ten centimetres. A photograph taken in your own garden and emailed to a stranger tells them which side of the house you were standing on. Social networks usually remove this on upload; email attachments, messaging apps that send files rather than compressed copies, and cloud share links do not.
Stripping without re-encoding
For JPEG, the copy keeps the start-of-image marker, the structural segments and the compressed scan data, dropping every APP1 through APP15 segment and every comment. For PNG, the text, timestamp, density and EXIF chunks are removed and the remaining chunks are copied with their own checksums untouched.
Neither path decodes an image. The pixels you download are bit-for-bit the pixels you uploaded, and you are told how many bytes went away. That is the difference between this and stripping tags by re-saving through Convert Image or Compress Image, which reach the same privacy result at the cost of a generation of quality.
Known limits
Compressed zTXt and iTXt chunks are reported as present but not decoded. Proprietary maker-notes are not interpreted. And a tag only records what some program wrote: an editor may have rewritten the timestamp, and a missing camera model proves nothing about a file's history.
Frequently asked
Which files can this actually read?
EXIF reached through a JPEG APP1 segment, a PNG eXIf chunk or a WebP RIFF EXIF chunk, plus PNG text, timestamp and density chunks and GIF frame counts. HEIC and AVIF keep theirs in boxes browsers do not expose.
It says no EXIF data found. Is that a failure?
No, it is a real answer. Screenshots, design exports and anything that has been through a social platform usually carry nothing, because most platforms strip the block when you upload.
Does removing the metadata damage the image?
No. Metadata segments and chunks are dropped and the remaining data is copied through, so the pixels in the stripped copy are bit-for-bit identical to the ones you uploaded. No decoding or re-encoding takes place.
How precise are the GPS coordinates in a photo?
Six decimal places of latitude resolve to roughly ten centimetres. A picture taken at home tells anyone who receives it which side of the house you were standing on, which is why a warning appears when a GPS block is present.