Image Metadata Viewer

Common questions

Is my photo uploaded anywhere?

No. The file is read by this page with a FileReader and parsed in your own browser, so there is no server in this, no account to make and no request of any kind. Your photo and the fields read out of it are never written to local storage either, which is deliberate: the coordinates in a holiday photo are the last thing that should outlive the tab you opened it in. The only two things this page remembers are which column you last read and which sample you last looked at, and the Start over button above the tool forgets both.

How do I tell whether a photo has my location in it?

The GPS cell in the readout answers it in one glance: it shows the coordinates in decimal degrees when the file carries them, and says none stored when it does not. Under the stage the same finding is spelled out, with the altitude and the time of the fix when those are present, and with the stored form of the coordinate in degrees, minutes and seconds, which is how EXIF actually writes it. A latitude reference of S or a longitude reference of W is applied as a negative number, so the pair you see is the pair a map expects. If the block is there but a value is stored with a zero denominator, or the numbers fall outside the 90 and 180 degrees a coordinate can have, no position is shown and the page says which of those happened rather than printing a broken number.

Which formats does it read?

JPEG and PNG. A HEIC from an iPhone, a WebP, an AVIF, a TIFF or a camera raw file is named and refused rather than half read, because those keep their metadata in structures this parser does not follow and a partial answer about your own photo is worse than none. Inside a JPEG it reads the frame header for the pixel size, the EXIF block in APP1, a JFIF density block and a plain comment segment, and it lists an XMP packet, an ICC profile or a Photoshop resource block as present without parsing them. Inside a PNG it reads IHDR, tEXt, uncompressed iTXt, pHYs, tIME, gAMA, sRGB and an eXIf chunk when one is there. A compressed zTXt or iTXt chunk is listed as present and not decompressed, because there is no decompressor in this tool, and the row says so instead of leaving a blank.

Why does one column say 178/100 and the other f/1.78?

Because one is the file and the other is us. EXIF stores an aperture as a rational number, a shutter as a fraction of a second, a date with colons in it and an orientation as a number from 1 to 8. The stored column prints those exactly as the file holds them, with no rounding and no unit added, and the reading column gives the interpretation with the rule visible next to it: f/1.78, 1/200 s, 2026-07-14 11:02:33, or rotate 90 degrees clockwise to display upright. The switch in the metadata pane flips between the two, and the table under the stage shows both at once. Where there is nothing to interpret, the reading column says as stored rather than repeating the value back at you.

The viewer says my photo has no metadata. Where did it go?

It is genuinely not there, and the page says so instead of guessing: with no EXIF block, there is no camera, no date and no GPS to show, and the fields that remain come from the frame header rather than from EXIF. That is the normal outcome for a picture that has been through a messaging app, a social network or an export that writes a fresh file, because each of those rewrites the image without copying the original block across. A screenshot of a photo is a new image too, and carries the metadata of the screenshot rather than of the photo. This page reads a file and never changes one, so it cannot put anything back and does not claim to.

Can it strip the metadata out of my photo?

No. This tool reads, and it never writes a file, so nothing you open here is modified in any way. What it gives you instead is the full inventory, and a JSON export of it through Copy or Download, so you know exactly what a file would reveal before you decide whether to send that file or a re-exported copy of it. Removing the fields is a different job with different risks, and a viewer that quietly edited your only copy would be the wrong place to do it.

How large a file can I open?

Up to 20 MB at a time, which is 20,971,520 bytes. The whole file is held in this browser while it is read, so that number is a memory bound rather than an upload limit: nothing is uploaded, and there is no per-day count, no sign-up and no paid tier behind the limit. A larger file is refused with both sizes named rather than read part way. In practice the metadata sits in the first few kilobytes of a photo, so a 20 MB ceiling covers the full-resolution output of every phone and nearly every camera.

What happens with a damaged or hand-edited file?

It is read as far as it can be trusted and no further. An EXIF block is a TIFF directory built out of byte offsets written by whatever made the file, so every offset here is checked against the block before it is followed: an entry pointing past the end is dropped and counted, a directory claiming more entries than the block can hold is refused whole, and a chain that points back at a directory already read is followed once and stopped. Every refusal is listed under the stage, a directory pointer that missed is named with the byte it pointed at, and the reading you get is what survived those checks. A truncated JPEG segment or a PNG chunk that declares more bytes than remain stops the read at that point and says where, and a file that is not an image at all is refused with the first four bytes shown.