EXIF Viewer

Every photo your phone or camera takes is shipped with a hidden second file attached: the Exif block. Exif (Exchangeable image file format) was first published by JEIDA in 1995 and is now maintained by CIPA as standard DC-008 — version 3.1 was published in January 2026. It piggybacks structured metadata onto JPEG, HEIC and TIFF files. The intention was good — give photographers a way to record camera settings, lens, exposure and timestamp so they could review their craft later. The consequence is that, by default, a modern phone also embeds the GPS coordinates where the photo was taken (the GPS IFD), the camera body's serial number (BodySerialNumber, since Exif 2.3) and the exact software version that wrote the file.

What's actually inside EXIF

A phone photo typically carries dozens of tags. Camera make and model. Lens (since iPhones now have multiple lenses, this tells you which one). Aperture, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, white balance. Date and time the photo was taken (down to the second), in the camera's local timezone. GPS latitude, longitude, altitude, and direction the camera was facing. A unique camera/sensor identifier. The software that processed the image (iOS version, app name). Orientation. Colour profile. Pixel dimensions. The list goes on. If the photographer used Lightroom, Photoshop, or any pro editor, even more — keywords, copyright info, edits applied, raw conversion settings.

In 2012, anti-virus pioneer John McAfee was located by Vice reporters who simply opened an iPhone photo of him in EXIF Viewer — the GPS coordinates pointed to a guesthouse in Guatemala.

Where EXIF leaks happen — and how to find out

Which platforms strip Exif changes without notice, so the honest answer is: test it. Download a photo you shared through the platform and drop it here — if the Camera and GPS groups come back empty, the platform re-encoded the picture. Two behaviours are worth knowing because they catch people out. Messaging apps that re-encode a picture sent as a photo commonly leave the original file untouched when the same picture is sent as a document or file. And an email attachment or a cloud-drive link is the file itself — nothing in between rewrites it. Never assume; check.

Why GPS metadata matters more than the other fields

Most Exif fields are harmless. Aperture and ISO can't dox you. The make and model of your camera might link photos to other photos you've taken, but on its own it's not identifying. GPS is different — a single photo's latitude and longitude can pinpoint your home, your office, your child's school or your running route. The McAfee case above is the famous example; the everyday one is a photo of a new flat or a first day at school. When the GPS group appears, this viewer shows a warning and a map link so you can see exactly what the file gives away. Always strip GPS before public posting unless you specifically want the location to be known.

What this tool's "stripped JPG" actually does

The stripped download re-encodes your photo through a browser canvas. The Canvas API has no concept of EXIF, IPTC, or XMP — when it writes a JPEG, it writes the pixel data only. Every tag, every GPS coordinate, every timestamp is gone. The trade-off is slight: re-encoding is a lossy round-trip, so you lose a tiny amount of image quality. For social posting this is invisible; for archival or print work, strip EXIF using a dedicated tool that preserves the original encoding (exiftool from the command line).

The one marker this viewer used to walk past

Your JPEG states the quality it was saved at — not in EXIF, but in a header called the quantisation table (the DQT marker), which is the table of divisors the encoder used to throw away detail. The library that writes most of the world's JPEGs builds that table by scaling a fixed reference table published in the JPEG specification, and the scaling runs backwards: generate the table for every quality from 1 to 100, and find the one that reproduces the table in your file. When it matches exactly, that is the quality your photo was saved at, read off the file rather than estimated. The panel above reports it whenever it can be recovered.

This matters for the stripped copy. Re-encoding at a higher quality than the source is the intuitive choice and the wrong one: in our own test set of twelve photographs, re-encoding at a fixed quality 94 produced files 44% larger on average than re-encoding each at its own recovered quality, and no closer to the original — the detail the source quality discarded is already gone, and a finer grid merely records the remaining error in more bytes. So the stripped download is written at the quality your file was actually saved at. Where the file came from an encoder that uses its own tables — Apple's sips and several stock-photo services do — there is no exact match, nothing is invented, and the download falls back to quality 92. The panel says which of the two happened.