Tooltrusty

Image Metadata (EXIF) Viewer

See what your photo is telling everyone — camera, timestamp and, often, exactly where you were standing.

Drop an image here or click to choose a file — a JPEG photo (EXIF is rarely present in PNG or WebP)

Runs in your browser. Everything you type or load here is processed locally by JavaScript on this page. Nothing is uploaded to Tooltrusty or to any third party.

What the image Metadata (EXIF) Viewer does

Digital cameras and phones write a block of metadata into every photo they take. The standard is called EXIF, and it records the camera make and model, the exposure settings, the software that last touched the file, the exact date and time, and — on most phones, unless you have turned it off — the GPS coordinates where the shutter was pressed.

This viewer reads that block directly out of the file. It parses the JPEG structure to find the APP1 segment, reads the TIFF header inside it, walks the image file directory, and decodes each tag it recognises, including the separate GPS directory. Coordinates stored as degrees, minutes and seconds are converted to the decimal form that mapping services expect.

The reason this tool exists is the GPS field. A photo posted straight from a camera roll can tell a stranger which house you live in, which school your children attend or which hotel room you were standing in. Most large social platforms strip EXIF on upload, but files sent by email, messaging apps in “original quality” mode, cloud folder links and direct downloads from a personal website usually keep it intact. If a photo has coordinates, this page shows a warning and a map link.

The Download a copy with all metadata removed button re-encodes the image through a canvas, which discards every metadata block as a side effect. The visible picture is preserved; the camera details, timestamps and coordinates are not. Because the whole process runs in your browser, you can safely inspect sensitive photos — which is the point, since uploading a photo to check whether it reveals your location would rather defeat the exercise.

How to use it

  1. Drop in a JPEG photo. Files straight from a camera or phone are the ones most likely to carry metadata.
  2. Read the tag list. Anything under GPS latitude and longitude is a location you may not want to share.
  3. If coordinates are present, use the map link to see exactly what the file reveals.
  4. Press Download a copy with all metadata removed to get a clean version to share.

A worked example

A photo taken on a phone typically reports something like:

Camera makeApple
Camera modeliPhone 15 Pro
Date taken2026:07:14 18:42:07
Exposure time1/120 s
F-numberf/1.8
ISO64
Focal length7 mm
GPS latitude51.501364
GPS longitude−0.141890

Those last two lines locate the photograph to within a few metres. The same file run through the strip button comes back with the picture unchanged and every row above gone — the tool reports zero tags found when you re-check it.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my photo show no EXIF data at all?

Because something already removed it. Screenshots never have EXIF; images downloaded from most social platforms have been stripped on upload; and any editor that re-encodes an image usually discards it. PNG and WebP files rarely carry EXIF in the first place.

Does removing metadata change how the photo looks?

The visible image is preserved, but the file is re-encoded as JPEG at high quality, so there is a very small generational loss. One pass is not noticeable. Note that orientation is baked in during re-encoding, which is what you want — a photo that relied on an orientation tag will now display correctly everywhere.

Do social media sites remove EXIF automatically?

The large platforms generally strip it on upload, but you should not rely on that. Files shared by email, by messaging apps sending at original quality, through cloud folder links or downloaded directly from a website usually retain everything.

Is my photo uploaded to read its metadata?

No. The file is read into an ArrayBuffer in your browser and parsed byte by byte in JavaScript on this page. That matters here more than anywhere else on the site: the whole purpose of the tool is checking for information you may not want to share.