EXIF Viewer — Read & Strip Photo Metadata
Drop a photo to see its EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata — camera settings, timestamps, GPS location and editing history — parsed in your browser, never uploaded.
Every photo carries a second, invisible photo
A JPEG is not just pixels. Between the image data sit blocks of structured metadata: the camera’s make, model and serial number, the exact shutter-aperture-ISO combination, the clock time to the second — and on phones, GPS coordinates accurate to a few meters. ExifView reads all of it in your browser and lays it out in plain groups: camera & settings, date & time, location, software & editing history, people & identity and the raw container itself.
The point is not curiosity — it is informed sharing. The “What this photo reveals” panel flags the fields that matter for privacy before you post the file: an embedded location, a device serial, your name in the author field, or a thumbnail that may still show the uncropped original. Then the strip button produces a clean copy — pixels only — verified by re-scanning the output for leftover metadata blocks.
What usually hides inside
- GPS coordinates — the single most sensitive field; a phone photo taken at home is a published home address. The report shows the exact coordinates and an optional map link.
- Device fingerprints — body and lens serial numbers, camera owner names and unique image IDs let anyone link scattered photos back to one device.
- Editing history — software names, XMP edit trails and IPTC captions reveal what tool touched the file and sometimes the original filename.
- Embedded thumbnails — many cameras and editors store a small preview JPEG inside the file; it is written at save time and may predate your crop or retouch.
- Quiet text — JPEG comments, PNG text chunks and Windows XP author/title fields often survive editors that strip the rest.
Where this goes wrong in the real world
Metadata leaks have burned people publicly — a fugitive located through a photo’s GPS tag, a TV host’s uncropped thumbnail recovered from a “cropped” image. The real cases page collects them, how to strip metadata covers every platform’s built-in removal method, and GPS tags explains why location is the field to watch.
What EXIF Reveals — Real Cases
A fugitive found by GPS tag, a thumbnail that betrayed a crop — what metadata has already cost real people.
Open →How to Strip Metadata on Every Platform
Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and ExifTool — every built-in way to clean a photo, plus the catch each one has.
Open →GPS Tags: The Quiet Leak
Your phone stamps street-level coordinates into every shot — silently. How geotagging works and how to control it.
Open →Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. ExifView is plain JavaScript running in this tab — the file is read from your disk, its bytes are parsed locally, and the report is drawn on your screen. There is no upload endpoint. You can load this page, disconnect from the internet, and it keeps working. The one exception by design: if you click the OpenStreetMap link next to GPS coordinates, the latitude and longitude go into that link's URL — nothing else ever leaves your device.
What metadata can ExifView read?
For JPEG files it walks every segment: EXIF (camera make, model, lens, shutter, aperture, ISO, focal length, timestamps, orientation), the GPS IFD (coordinates, altitude, direction, speed), embedded thumbnails, MakerNote blobs, XMP packets (edit history, keywords, ratings), IPTC caption/copyright/keywords inside Photoshop APP13 blocks, ICC color profiles and JPEG comments. For PNG it reads the eXIf chunk plus tEXt, iTXt and zTXt textual chunks; for WebP the EXIF and XMP chunks.
My photo shows no EXIF — is it really clean?
Probably. Social platforms (Instagram, Facebook, X) strip metadata when they re-encode uploads, so a file downloaded from them is often already clean — which is exactly what this tool confirms. But a clean report only means no metadata in the file itself; it says nothing about the pixels (faces, landmarks, license plates) or about metadata the platform kept for itself before stripping.
How does the strip feature work?
The image is decoded to raw pixels in a canvas, the EXIF orientation is applied to those pixels (so nothing comes back sideways), and the result is re-encoded as a fresh JPEG, PNG or WebP. The new file contains pixel data only — every metadata segment is gone, which the tool verifies by re-scanning the output and reporting the number of metadata blocks found.
Does re-encoding reduce image quality?
For JPEG output, slightly — re-encoding a JPEG at 92% quality is visually indistinguishable for photos but is a second lossy generation. If pixel-perfect output matters, choose a PNG input (PNG output stays lossless) or keep the original and strip a copy for sharing only.
Why does the GPS row say 'street level' accuracy?
Phone GPS tags are usually precise to a few meters — accurate enough to identify a house, not just a neighborhood. Some files also store a horizontal-positioning-error value, which the report shows when present. Read GPS tags: the quiet leak for how geotagging happens and which platforms keep it.
Latest articles
GPS Tags: The Quiet Leak
Your phone stamps street-level coordinates into every shot — silently. How geotagging works and how to control it.
How to Strip Metadata on Every Platform
Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and ExifTool — every built-in way to clean a photo, plus the catch each one has.
What EXIF Reveals — Real Cases
A fugitive found by GPS tag, a thumbnail that betrayed a crop — what metadata has already cost real people.