EXIF viewer

The field almost everyone is here for is GPS. Phones embed the exact coordinates of every photo by default, and those coordinates travel with the file — through email, through a messaging app that sends "as a file" rather than compressing, through a cloud folder. A photo taken at home and posted to a forum can carry your address to five decimal places, which is about a metre.

What strips it and what does not is worth knowing. Most social platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — remove EXIF on upload as a side effect of re-encoding, and are the safest case. Sending "as a document" or "original quality" in a messaging app keeps everything. Email attachments keep everything. And re-saving through an image editor usually drops it, because the editor writes a fresh file rather than editing the original bytes.

EXIF lives in the JPEG’s APP1 segment as a TIFF structure, which is why the parsing is fiddlier than it looks: the byte order is declared in the file and can be either endianness, so a reader that assumes Intel ordering silently misreads every photo from a camera that writes Motorola. Both are handled here.

This reads JPEG only. PNG and WebP have their own metadata containers that work differently, and neither is where camera data normally lives.

One more thing worth checking on a second-hand camera: the serial number and the shutter count are often in there, which tells you how much a body has actually been used.