Free online EXIF viewer · nothing is uploaded
A free online EXIF viewer that shows the camera, lens, exposure settings, capture time and GPS location stored inside any photo. Drop in a JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP or DNG file and the EXIF metadata appears instantly — read on your own device, never uploaded, never stored, never seen by anyone else.
Background
Every time a camera or phone saves a photo, it writes a block of information into the file alongside the pixels. That block is called EXIF — Exchangeable Image File Format — and it is a small technical diary of the shot: which body and lens were used, the aperture, shutter speed, ISO and focal length, whether the flash fired, the moment the shutter opened, and, when location services are switched on, the GPS coordinates of where you were standing.
Editing software adds more. Lightroom, Photoshop, phone editors and export presets leave behind the name and version of the program that last saved the file, sometimes an author or copyright field, and often XMP blocks describing crops, ratings and keywords. None of it is visible in the image, and almost all of it travels with the file when you send it to someone.
That is the part people underestimate. Metadata is not stored in the app you shared from or in a cloud account somewhere — it is inside the bytes of the photo. Anyone who receives the original file can read it with a tool like this one in a couple of seconds, which is exactly why it is worth knowing what is in there before you send it.
Why it matters
A holiday snap can carry the exact coordinates of the beach — and a photo taken at home carries your address just as precisely. Checking a file before you upload it to a forum, marketplace listing or dating profile takes seconds and tells you exactly what you would be handing over.
Every frame records the aperture, shutter speed, ISO and focal length that produced it. Reading those numbers back on a shot you like is the fastest way to understand why it worked, and to repeat it deliberately next time.
Metadata is often the only evidence of when a photo was actually taken and which device took it. That matters for insurance claims, warranty disputes, journalism, listings and any situation where an image is offered as proof of something.
How to use it
There is nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. The whole tool is a single page that does its work locally.
Open a photoDrag a file onto the upload area, click it to browse your device, or paste an image straight from your clipboard. JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP and DNG files are all read.
The metadata is sorted into camera and exposure settings, date and time, location, file details, and software or authorship. Empty groups are hidden, so you only ever see what the file actually contains.
When GPS coordinates are present you get decimal and DMS forms, altitude, the direction the camera was facing, and an optional map. The map only loads when you ask it to.
Copy everything as formatted text for an email or a note, or download the full extraction as JSON for a report or a script. Then clear the photo — nothing is retained once you close the tab.
Privacy
Not as a promise in a policy document — as a consequence of how the page is built. There is no server that could receive your file.
ExifInfoViewer is a static website: a handful of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files served from a CDN. When you choose a photo, the browser hands the file to JavaScript running in your tab, that code reads the metadata block, and the results are written straight into the page. There is no upload endpoint, no processing queue, no storage bucket and no database anywhere in the stack, because a static site has none of those things.
Nothing is remembered between visits either. The preview is a temporary in-memory reference to your own file, and closing or reloading the tab discards everything. We do not run analytics, advertising or third-party trackers, and there is no account to create.
The single optional exception is the map. If a photo contains GPS coordinates you can press Load map to see them plotted, which fetches map tiles from OpenStreetMap and therefore sends those coordinates to OpenStreetMap. Nothing loads until you press the button, and your photo is never part of that request.
You do not have to take our word for any of this. Open your browser's developer tools, select the Network tab, and load a photo: you will not see a request carrying your image.
The full guide
An EXIF viewer is a tool that opens the hidden data block your camera writes into an image file and prints it in a form you can read. Every JPEG your phone saves contains two things: the pixels you see, and a header full of tags describing how those pixels came to exist. Image galleries, browsers and messaging apps show you the first and quietly ignore the second. An EXIF metadata viewer does the opposite — it decodes the header, resolves the numeric tag IDs into human names, and turns raw values into something meaningful, soFNumber: 18/10 becomesƒ/1.8 and a pair of rational-number GPS triples becomes a point on a map.
That decoding step is why a dedicated photo EXIF viewer beats your operating system's file inspector. Windows Properties and macOS Get Info show a handful of tags each and stop; a real image EXIF viewer reads the whole EXIF block, plus the IPTC and XMP segments that editing software adds, and shows you every field the file actually contains rather than a curated dozen.
Searching for an EXIF viewer usually leads to two dead ends: desktop software you have to download and trust, or an app store listing for something like "EXIF Viewer Pro" with a paywall between you and the GPS field. Neither is necessary. Reading metadata is a fast, well-understood parsing job that a browser can do on its own, which is why this EXIF viewer online is free, has no account, no upload limit, no watermark and no paid tier holding back the interesting tags.
There is nothing to install and nothing to keep updated. The page is static HTML and JavaScript; open it on a laptop, a phone or a borrowed machine and it behaves identically. Because the parsing runs locally, large RAW and HEIC files do not have to travel anywhere before you see results — the viewer reads the metadata header rather than the whole image, so a 40 MB DNG returns as quickly as a small JPEG. Files up to 100 MB are accepted.
JPEG and TIFF are the classic EXIF containers and are fully supported. So are HEIC and HEIF, the formats modern iPhones save by default, which many older tools still refuse to open. PNG and WebP are read for the metadata chunks they carry, and DNG — Adobe's RAW container — is parsed like the TIFF derivative it is. In practice, if a camera or phone produced the file, this viewer will find whatever is in it.
What it finds depends entirely on the file. A photo straight off a camera is dense with tags. The same photo after a trip through Instagram, WhatsApp or a web optimiser is usually bare, because those services strip metadata during re-encoding. That is not a failure of the viewer — it is a genuine and useful result, and often the exact thing you wanted to confirm.
If you have used another online EXIF viewer — exif.tools, Jeffrey's Image Metadata Viewer, or one of the many upload-and-inspect sites — the question worth asking is where your photo goes when you press the button. On most such sites the file is transmitted to a server, parsed there, and the results are sent back. That is a reasonable way to build a tool, but it means a copy of your image, with its GPS coordinates intact, has left your device and landed on infrastructure you do not control, subject to a retention policy you have probably not read.
This EXIF info viewer takes the other route. The file never moves. Your browser hands it to JavaScript running in your tab, the metadata is extracted in memory, and the results are written straight into the page. There is no upload endpoint to send it to, because a static site has no server that could accept one — a structural guarantee rather than a policy promise. You can confirm it in thirty seconds with the Network tab of your browser's developer tools.
EXIF defines several hundred tags and most photos use only a fraction of them. These are the groups this viewer surfaces first, because they are the ones people actually open a metadata viewer to find.
Make, Model, LensModel, LensMake, SerialNumber
Which body and glass produced the frame.
FNumber, ExposureTime, ISO, FocalLength, Flash, ExposureProgram
The settings the photographer or the phone chose.
DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, ModifyDate, OffsetTime
When the shutter opened, and when the file was last written.
GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude, GPSAltitude, GPSImgDirection
Where you were standing, often to within a few metres.
ImageWidth, ImageHeight, Orientation, ColorSpace, XResolution
Dimensions, rotation and colour handling.
Software, Artist, Copyright, XMP blocks
What edited the file, and who claims it.
The same handful of tags answer very different questions depending on who is asking.
Photographers read exposure data off frames that worked. Aperture, shutter speed, ISO and focal length, taken together, explain why one shot has the look you were after and the next one does not — and unlike your memory of the afternoon, the file does not misremember.
Anyone about to post publicly checks the GPS field first. A photo taken at home carries your address as precisely as a photo from a beach carries the beach. Marketplace listings, forum posts and dating profiles are all places where an original file can say far more than you meant it to, and thirty seconds in a free EXIF viewer is the cheapest way to find out before it is public rather than after.
Investigators, journalists and buyers use metadata as evidence. The capture timestamp, the device that took the shot, and the trail of editing software left in theSoftware tag are often the only way to test whether an image is what someone says it is. An absent or inconsistent EXIF block is itself a finding — it usually means the photo was re-saved, re-encoded, or taken from somewhere else.
Developers and archivists need the data in bulk. The JSON export gives you the complete extraction — including tags the page does not display — ready to pipe into a script, attach to a bug report, or file alongside the image in an archive.
How to use it
An EXIF viewer is a tool that reads the hidden metadata block a camera or phone writes inside an image file and displays it in readable form. Every photo contains two things: the pixels you see, and an EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) header describing how those pixels were made — camera and lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, the date and time of the shot, and often the GPS coordinates of where it was taken.
Ordinary image viewers show you the picture and ignore that header. An EXIF viewer decodes it: it resolves numeric tag IDs into names, converts raw values into readable ones, and groups the result so you can actually use it. ExifInfoViewer is a free online EXIF viewer that does this in your browser, without uploading the photo anywhere.
Using an EXIF viewer takes three steps and less than a minute:
Always work from the original file. A copy that has been through a chat app, a social network or an image optimiser has usually had its metadata stripped during re-encoding.
An online EXIF viewer runs in a browser tab, so there is nothing to download, install or update, and it works the same on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. Open the page, add your photo, and the metadata is displayed immediately.
The one thing worth checking before you use any online viewer is where the parsing happens. Sites that transmit your file to a server to read it there put a copy of your photo — GPS coordinates included — on infrastructure you do not control. ExifInfoViewer parses the file locally with JavaScript in your own tab, so nothing is uploaded at all. You can confirm that in any browser: open the developer tools, select the Network tab, then load a photo and watch that no request carries your image.
There is no native Chrome EXIF viewer built into the browser — right-clicking an image gives you no metadata option, and the Inspect panel shows the markup, not the file's EXIF header. You have two practical routes.
Use a web-based viewer (no extension needed). Open this page in Chrome and drag a photo onto it from your file manager, or click to browse, or paste with Ctrl+V. For an image on a website, right-click it and choose Save image as…, then drop the saved file here. Do not use "Copy image" — Chrome copies decoded pixels to the clipboard, which discards the EXIF header, so a pasted copy will look like it has no metadata even when the original is full of it.
Or install a Chrome extension. Several EXIF viewer extensions in the Chrome Web Store add a right-click option on images. They are convenient, but most ask for permission to read and change data on every site you visit, which is a broad grant for a small feature — worth weighing against a page that needs no permissions at all.
Firefox has no native EXIF viewer either. Its Tools → Page Info → Media panel lists the images on a page with their dimensions and file type, but it does not decode the EXIF block, so there is no camera, exposure or GPS information there.
The approach is the same as in Chrome: open this page in Firefox and drag, browse or paste your photo. Drag-and-drop and clipboard paste both work in Firefox exactly as they do elsewhere. For an image on a web page, use Save Image As… to keep the original file intact rather than copying it, since copying an image re-encodes it and drops the metadata. Firefox add-ons that show EXIF on right-click also exist, with the same permission trade-off as their Chrome equivalents.
There are a number of good free options, and the honest answer is that they mostly read the same standard tags — the differences are in privacy, format support and how much they show you.
Judge them on four things: whether your file is uploaded or read locally, whether HEIC and RAW files are supported, whether you get the complete tag set or a summary, and whether you can export the results.
For online use specifically, the deciding factor is usually privacy, because a photo is a far more revealing thing to hand to a stranger's server than most people assume. A viewer that parses the file in your own browser — as this one does — removes that question entirely: there is no upload endpoint, so there is nothing to trust and nothing to retain.
After that, look for support for the formats you actually shoot (HEIC from an iPhone and DNG or other RAW files defeat a surprising number of web tools), a complete tag list rather than a tidy summary, GPS shown in both decimal and DMS with an optional map, and an export you can keep. ExifInfoViewer is built around exactly those criteria, is free with no account or paid tier, and works the same on desktop and mobile.
FAQ
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a block of information your camera or phone writes inside the image file itself, alongside the pixels. It typically records the camera make and model, the lens, the exposure settings used for the shot (aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, flash), the date and time the photo was taken, and — if location services were switched on — the GPS coordinates of where you were standing. Editing software adds its own tags, such as the name of the app that last saved the file and any copyright or author fields you have configured. An EXIF viewer is simply a tool that decodes that block and shows it to you in readable form.
Yes, completely, and there is no paid tier. Many "EXIF Viewer Pro" apps put the interesting fields — GPS coordinates in particular — behind a purchase, or limit how many photos you can inspect. This one has no limits, no signup, no watermark and no advertising. Reading metadata is a fast parsing job your browser can do unaided, so there are no server costs to recover; the site is a set of static files on a CDN.
No. The photo you choose is read directly by your browser using the standard File API and parsed on your own device with JavaScript. There is no server-side processing, no upload endpoint, no storage bucket and no database — this site is a set of static files. You can verify it yourself: open your browser developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and select a photo. You will see no request carrying your image. The only optional outbound request is the map, which loads from OpenStreetMap solely when you click "Load map", and it receives just the coordinates, never the photo.
JPEG and TIFF, the classic EXIF containers, are fully supported, as are HEIC and HEIF — the formats modern iPhones save by default, which many older tools cannot open. PNG and WebP are read for the metadata chunks they carry, AVIF is supported, and DNG files are parsed as the TIFF derivatives they are. Files up to 100 MB are accepted, which comfortably covers RAW output from full-frame and medium-format cameras.
Yes. It is a web page rather than an app, so it runs in Safari, Chrome and any other modern mobile browser with nothing to install. On a phone you can tap the upload area to pick an image from your camera roll or take a new one. HEIC photos straight from an iPhone are read without conversion, which is usually the sticking point with other mobile metadata viewers. Because the parsing happens on the handset, your photos never leave it.
This is common and usually means the metadata was removed before the file reached you. Most social networks and messaging apps (Facebook, Instagram, X, WhatsApp, Discord) strip metadata when images are uploaded or compressed. Screenshots never contain camera EXIF because no camera was involved. Images exported for the web, converted between formats, or run through an optimiser often lose their tags too, and some privacy-conscious phones and apps strip location by default. If a photo is straight off a camera or phone and still shows nothing, check that you are opening the original file rather than a shared or re-saved copy.
No, and you should never assume either way — check. GPS coordinates are only written if location access was enabled for the camera app at the moment the shot was taken, and if the device had a usable position fix. Dedicated cameras without a GPS receiver or phone pairing record no location at all. Conversely, a photo you believe is anonymous may carry coordinates accurate to a few metres, which is exactly why it is worth inspecting a file before you share it publicly.
Yes — use the companion EXIF remover. It strips the EXIF, GPS, XMP, IPTC and comment blocks out of a photo and hands you back a cleaned copy, leaving your original untouched. Like the viewer, it runs entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.
JPEG, PNG and WebP files are rewritten losslessly, meaning the picture data is copied through byte for byte and there is no re-compression or quality loss. You can clean several photos in one pass, and each cleaned file is automatically re-scanned to confirm no metadata survived.
Functionally, most EXIF viewers show you the same tags, because they are all reading the same standard block. The difference is where that reading happens. Sites that ask you to upload a file parse it on their server, which means a copy of your photo — GPS coordinates included — leaves your device and lands on infrastructure you do not control. ExifInfoViewer parses the file in your browser instead, so there is no upload at all; that is a property of how the site is built, not a policy you have to trust. Beyond that, it reads HEIC and DNG without conversion, exports complete JSON rather than a summary, and shows GPS in both decimal and DMS form with an optional map that only loads when you ask for it.