View EXIF and file metadata

Drop a file and see what it is carrying. A photograph usually knows where it was taken and which device took it; a document usually knows who wrote it. Nothing is changed and nothing is uploaded — this reads the file and tells you, which is the step most people actually want before deciding whether to remove anything.

Where it runs Any file is read in the browser. Nothing is uploaded.
No queue, no account It starts the moment you drop the file, and it never asks who you are.
No watermark What comes out is the file you made, with nothing added to it.

How it works

Drop the file onto the box above, or press it to choose one.
The format is worked out from its contents rather than its name.
Read what it is carrying. Entries that identify you are marked.
Nothing is altered. If you want the data gone, the metadata remover does that.

What a photograph knows about you

A picture taken on a phone usually stores the coordinates it was taken at — accurate enough to identify a building, not just a town — along with the date and time to the second, the make and model of the device, often its serial number, and the exposure settings. None of it is visible when you look at the image, and all of it travels with the file when you send it, post it, or attach it to a listing.

Some photographs also carry a thumbnail generated before the picture was edited. That is how an image somebody cropped can still contain what they cropped out, and it is the single most surprising thing this tool shows people.

And what a document knows

Word, Excel and PowerPoint files record the author, whoever last saved it, the organisation from the software licence, the total editing time and the template it came from. PDFs additionally record the program that produced them, which is frequently enough to identify an employer. Audio files carry tagging software and sometimes purchase identifiers; video carries the encoder and the recording device.

Reading it is deliberately separate from removing it. Looking at a file should not change it, and plenty of people arrive wanting to know rather than wanting to act.

The coordinates are the part worth checking first

If location services were on when a photograph was taken, the file carries latitude and longitude to a precision that identifies a building rather than a neighbourhood — frequently to within a few metres. A photograph taken at home therefore carries a home address.

It is the one field that is worth looking at before anything is published, sold, or sent to a stranger. Platforms differ in what they strip on upload, and a file sent by email or messaging app is usually untouched. Knowing what is there is the point of this page; removing it is a separate one, deliberately.

The date is not always the date

A photograph carries several timestamps that can disagree: when the shutter fired, when the file was digitised, and when it was last modified. Editing software updates some and not others, and a camera with the wrong clock writes the wrong time confidently.

They also usually carry no time zone, so a photograph taken at 14:00 records 14:00 with nothing saying where. That is why a holiday album sometimes sorts strangely, and why a timestamp is weaker evidence of when something happened than it appears to be.

What the fields tell you about how a file was made

The software field names the program that last wrote the file, which is often more revealing than the camera model — it shows whether an image came straight off a device or passed through editing, and which editor. A missing camera model on a photograph is itself informative: it usually means the file has been re-saved by something that did not carry the original data forward.

For documents, the producer and creator fields work the same way, naming the application and frequently the version. None of this is hidden or protected; it is ordinary structured data that every reader can see, which is exactly why it is worth looking before sending.

Reading happens here without the file moving

The file is parsed inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, which matters because the reason to inspect a file is usually suspicion about what it contains — and handing it to a website to find out would be a strange way to resolve that.

It also means there is no size limit beyond your own memory, and a folder can be checked without a queue. For a batch of photographs about to be published, going through them here is faster than opening each one in an editor.

View EXIF and file metadata: common questions

Is my file uploaded to read it?

No. It is read in your browser and nothing is transmitted — which matters here more than almost anywhere, since the entire question is what private information the file contains.

Does this change my file?

Not at all. It reads and reports. The file on your device is untouched, and there is no download because nothing was produced.

Can I see where a photo was taken?

If the photograph carries coordinates, yes, and they are marked as identifying. Many pictures do not — social networks strip them when they re-encode an upload, and some phones are set not to record them.

How do I remove what it found?

The metadata remover does that, and shows you the file again afterwards so you can confirm it is gone. This page is the step before: look first, then decide.

Which files can be inspected?

Photographs, PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, video and audio. The format is identified from the contents, so a file with a misleading extension is still read correctly.