EXIF Viewer

Every photo file has room for far more than pixels. The EXIF standard defines several hundred fields, and cameras and phones fill in whatever they can: the make and model of the body, the lens fitted, the aperture, shutter speed and ISO, whether the flash fired, the metering and exposure modes, the date and time to the second, and frequently a GPS position with an altitude.

Alongside EXIF, files often carry XMP (Adobe's editing metadata, which can include a creator name and a full edit history), IPTC (captions, credits and copyright used by news organisations), an ICC colour profile, and an embedded thumbnail. This tool reports each block separately, along with how many bytes it occupies.

Coordinates are the field with real-world consequences. Phone GPS is usually accurate to within a few metres, which is enough to identify a specific house rather than a neighbourhood. A photo taken indoors and posted to a public forum, a marketplace listing, or a dating profile can carry the address it was taken at.

The pattern matters as much as any single photo. A set of images with coordinates reveals where someone lives, works, and travels, and when. This is why the report leads with a plain-language summary of what the file exposes rather than making you interpret a table of raw tags.

This tool parses the file in your browser. The container structure is walked directly — JPEG APPn segments, PNG chunks, WebP RIFF chunks — the embedded TIFF header is decoded, and the tags are formatted for display. No part of the file is sent anywhere, which is the only sensible design for a tool whose job is to reveal sensitive information.

A practical benefit follows from that: once the page has loaded it works with no connection at all. You can check a folder of photos on a plane, and none of them touch a network.

Metadata is not inherently a problem. Photographers rely on exposure data to learn from their own work, archives depend on capture dates for ordering, and IPTC credit and copyright fields exist to protect authorship. Location data is genuinely useful for travel photography and mapping projects. The point is to know what a file carries and to decide deliberately, rather than to discover after publishing that every photo included your address.