Image Metadata Viewer

Every camera writes a block of information into the file alongside the image itself. The EXIF standard defines most of it, and it was designed for photographers — a record of exactly how each frame was exposed, which is genuinely useful when you are trying to work out why one shot worked and another did not.

Modern phones add considerably more. GPS coordinates, altitude and compass heading if location services are enabled; the device model and often a serial number; the software version that processed the image. Some cameras populate owner and copyright fields from settings you configured once and forgot.

Editing applications append their own entries, so a file can accumulate a partial history of what was done to it and when. None of this is visible when you look at the picture, and all of it travels with the file.

The most practical reason to look is to find out what you are about to give away. A photograph taken at home carries your address; one taken at work carries your employer's. Selling something online, posting to a forum, sending a file to a stranger — in each case the image is anonymous and the metadata is not.

There are constructive uses too. Photographers examine exposure data to learn from their own results or to understand how someone else achieved a shot. Anyone organising a large photo library relies on capture timestamps to sort images that filenames have long since scrambled. Insurance and legal documentation often turns on when and where a photograph was taken.

And when you receive an image, metadata is a first check on provenance — though a soft one, since anything in it can be edited.

Metadata is data, not evidence. Every field can be altered with freely available tools, so a timestamp or a location proves only that someone wrote those values into the file. Treat what you find as a lead rather than a conclusion.

Absence proves even less. A photograph with no metadata has very likely been through a platform that strips it, or is a screenshot, or was re-saved by an editor — none of which implies anything was hidden deliberately.

The one thing metadata does establish reliably is what a file is currently disclosing. That is the question this tool answers well, and it is usually the question that matters before you send something.

The file is parsed inside your browser and never uploaded, which is the correct handling for a tool whose entire purpose is examining potentially sensitive information. Sending a photograph to a server in order to discover whether it reveals your address would be an odd trade.

HEIC and HEIF files work here even though the site cannot display them in the browser. Metadata sits in the container rather than in the compressed pixel data, so the parser reads the tags without ever touching the HEVC stream — which is why this works locally while HEIC conversion has to run on a server.