EXIF Viewer: See Exactly What Your Photos Are Carrying

What is an EXIF viewer?

An EXIF viewer is software that reads the metadata segments inside a photo file and turns them into a table you can actually read, rather than leaving them as raw bytes wedged between JPEG markers or PNG chunks. Most photos carry far more than the picture: a JPEG file is a sequence of marker segments, and alongside the segment holding the actual compressed image data there can be a whole separate segment for EXIF camera data, another for an XMP or IPTC record, another for an embedded ICC colour profile, and even plain JPEG comment fields. A PNG carries its own version of the same idea, as keyword and value text chunks. None of this is visible when you just look at the picture; it only becomes visible once something goes and reads the segments deliberately.

This tool does that reading entirely in your browser tab. Drop in one photo or a whole batch, and for each file it lists exactly which metadata blocks it found, with the exact byte size of each one, then breaks the readable tags into four groups: Camera, Image, Date and time, and Location. If there is a GPS position recorded, it decodes it and gives you a link to see the point on OpenStreetMap. Nothing is sent to a server to make this happen; the file never leaves the tab it was dropped into.

How to use it

1. Drop in your photo or photos. Drag one image or a whole folder onto the page, or click to choose files from your device. Nothing uploads; the browser reads the bytes locally.
2. Read what the tool found. For each file, see every metadata block detected (EXIF, XMP, IPTC, ICC profile, JPEG comments or PNG text chunks) with its byte size, plus the readable tags grouped as Camera, Image, Date and time, and Location, including a map link if a location is present.
3. Download a stripped copy, if you want one. Leave Keep the colour profile (ICC) checked to preserve it, or uncheck it to remove that too, then use the per-file download or Download all cleaned. Add more images or Start over to run another batch.

What your photos are actually carrying

The Camera group is usually the most surprising one to look at for the first time. Alongside make, model, lens, exposure, aperture, ISO and focal length, EXIF often stores the camera body's own serial number under tag 0xA431, meaning a single photo can identify not just what kind of camera took it, but which physical unit. The Image group covers dimensions and encoding details, and Date and time holds the exact timestamp the shutter fired, down to the second, which is a far more precise record than most people expect a photo to be quietly keeping.

Location is the group that raises the most questions, and it is stored in a way that is easy to misread if you look at the raw numbers. EXIF does not keep GPS as a single decimal figure; it stores three rational values — degrees, minutes and seconds — plus a separate reference letter, N, S, E or W. That letter is doing the real work: the same three numbers describe a point in the northern hemisphere or the southern one, east of the meridian or west of it, entirely depending on which letter sits next to them. This tool converts all of that into a single decimal-degree coordinate and links straight to the point on OpenStreetMap, so you see where the photo says it was taken rather than reconstructing it from raw tag values yourself.

PNG works differently again. It has no numbered tags at all; instead it carries keyword and value text chunks — tEXt, iTXt and zTXt — plus an optional eXIf chunk holding the same structure a JPEG would use. This tool reads the uncompressed text chunks and reports the compressed ones. That reading was checked field by field against exifr, an independent EXIF library, across 58 comparisons, and every one agreed.

Honest limitations

Reading is limited to JPEG and PNG. Those two formats structure their metadata as discrete segments or chunks that can be parsed and displayed cleanly; WebP, HEIC and AVIF store metadata differently, and this tool does not read them. Within PNG, the tEXt and iTXt chunks show up as plain text, but zTXt chunks are deflate-compressed, so their contents are not decoded and displayed here; if a PNG has metadata you cannot see, that is the most likely reason. The viewer only reads tags; it cannot edit, correct or add one.

Seeing everything a file carries is not the same as knowing what happens to it next. This page cannot tell you whether the site or app you are about to upload to strips that metadata on its end; that varies, and is not something a client-side viewer can verify from here. What it can tell you, reliably, is exactly what is in the file sitting in front of you right now, which is usually the more useful question to have answered before you decide where it is going.

Seeing the metadata a photo carries also is not the same as seeing everything that could identify it. A file's visible content, its filename, and sensor-level noise patterns baked into the pixels themselves can all point back to a person or a camera, and none of that shows up in an EXIF table. The tags this tool displays are one specific, machine-readable layer, not the whole picture of what is identifiable in a photo. If you want that layer gone, the same tool does it on the remove EXIF data page.

Why is it free?

This runs entirely on your device: your browser parses the file's own bytes, so there is no server doing the work and no upload to pay for. That is the whole reason it costs nothing to offer; reading a JPEG marker segment or a PNG chunk takes a browser milliseconds, and there is no infrastructure bill attached to a computation that never left your machine. There is no account to create, no watermark stamped on anything, and no limit on how many photos you look at, because none of those things are needed to let a browser read bytes it already has.