EXIF viewer

The absurdity this fixes

To find out whether a photo reveals where you live, most tools require you to upload the photo that reveals where you live.

That is the whole reason this page exists. It reads the file in your browser and sends nothing anywhere — a browser test asserts that opening a photo issues no network request at all.

What EXIF actually contains

Far more than most people expect. Beyond the obvious camera settings:

• GPS coordinates, to within a few metres, on nearly every photo taken with a phone that has not had location switched off for the camera.
• The exact date and time, to the second.
• The camera’s serial number, and often the lens’s. These are stable across every photo that camera has ever taken, which is enough to link a set of anonymous images to each other and to any photo you have posted with your name on it.
• The owner’s name, if it was ever set in the camera.
• The software used to edit it, and sometimes a thumbnail of the original image — which survives cropping, so a cropped photo can still contain the uncropped version.

Location and identifying tags are marked in the list.

What social platforms do, and do not do

Most large platforms strip EXIF when you upload. That is not protection you can rely on:

• Messaging apps vary. Some strip, some do not, and “send as file” usually bypasses whatever stripping the app does for photos.
• Email attachments are untouched.
• Cloud storage links preserve everything.
• Platforms that strip it from the displayed image have still received the original, and their stripping is a courtesy rather than a promise.

The reliable approach is to remove it before the file leaves your machine.

Stripping is lossless here

The image data is copied byte for byte. Only the metadata segments are removed, and the entropy-coded scan — the actual picture — is untouched, so nothing is re-encoded and no quality is lost.

Most tools that “remove EXIF” decode and re-encode the image, which strips the metadata and quietly degrades the picture at the same time. For a privacy tool that is a poor trade when it is avoidable.

Two things are deliberately kept:

• The orientation tag, so a portrait photo does not come back sideways.
• The tables the file needs to decode at all — the quantisation and Huffman tables in a JPEG, and the header and image chunks in a PNG or WebP.

Everything else goes, including APP13 (IPTC, which carries captions, names and locations), any comment segment, and the text chunks a PNG editor leaves behind.

Which formats, and what each one allows

Read: JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, PNG, WebP and TIFF. EXIF is the same TIFF structure in every one of them; only where the file keeps that block differs. A JPEG puts it in an APP1 segment, a PNG in an eXIf chunk, a WebP in a RIFF chunk, and a HEIC or AVIF stores it as an item in the file’s own index — which is why a good many tools that claim to support EXIF quietly show nothing at all for a photo straight off an iPhone.

Cleaned losslessly: JPEG, PNG and WebP.

HEIC and AVIF can be read but not cleaned here. Their index records each item’s position as an absolute offset into the file, so removing the metadata means rewriting every offset that follows — and a slip there produces a file that looks fine until something refuses to open it. TIFF is left out for the opposite reason: its metadata is the file’s directory structure rather than an attachment to it.

For those, converting the photo is the honest answer. A converter re-encodes the picture and drops the metadata with it, and this page links you to one when you open a file it cannot clean. The reverse is worth knowing too: a converter that deliberately preserves metadata carries the EXIF across, so a converted photo is not automatically a cleaned one.

Nothing is uploaded

Read and written entirely in this page.