EXIF Viewer
Choose a JPEG photo to see its embedded EXIF metadata — camera make and model, date, exposure settings, and GPS location if it's present. The file is parsed byte-by-byte with the browser's own DataView; it is never uploaded, and neither is anything hidden inside it, including location data.
Pick a JPEG straight from your camera or phone — screenshots and images re-saved by social apps usually have their EXIF stripped already, so results will vary.
No EXIF metadata found in this image.
How the parsing actually works
A JPEG is a sequence of marker segments, each starting with a 0xFFxx byte pair. This tool scans forward from the 0xFFD8 start-of-image marker looking for 0xFFE1, the APP1 segment that carries EXIF, and
confirms its payload starts with the literal bytes "Exif\0\0" before treating it as EXIF at all — a
JPEG can have an APP1 segment that's actually something else
entirely, like embedded XMP data. Right after that header comes
a TIFF header: a byte-order mark ("II" for
little-endian or "MM" for big-endian), a magic
number, and an offset to the first Image File Directory (IFD0).
Every offset from that point on — including the pointer to the
separate Exif sub-IFD that holds exposure time, aperture, ISO,
and focal length — is measured from the start of that TIFF
header, not the start of the file, which is the detail
that trips up naive implementations. Values that don't fit in
the 4 bytes reserved for them (most text and all of the
exposure/aperture/focal-length fields) are stored as a pointer
to their real location instead, using that same base offset.
Worked example
A RATIONAL value in EXIF is two 4-byte integers back to back — a numerator and a denominator — not a single decimal number. For exposure time, a camera might store the pair 1 and 125; this tool reads both integers and displays them as "1/125 s", the way you'd actually read a shutter speed, instead of converting it to a much less familiar 0.008. Aperture works the same way — a stored pair of 28 and 10 becomes "f/2.8" — and focal length follows suit, turning 50 and 1 into "50mm".
Frequently asked questions
Does my photo get uploaded anywhere?
No — and this is the one tool on the site where that guarantee matters most. EXIF data can include the exact GPS coordinates a photo was taken at, along with the camera model and the date and time. This page reads the file locally with file.arrayBuffer() and parses the raw bytes with the browser's own DataView; nothing is sent to a server, so your photo and its location never leave your device just because you wanted to see its metadata.
Why does it say "No EXIF metadata found"?
A few common reasons: the file is a PNG or WebP (EXIF is a JPEG-specific container, so those formats simply don't carry it the same way), or it's a JPEG that's been re-uploaded through social media, messaging apps, or some photo editors — most of them strip EXIF entirely on export for privacy or file-size reasons. Either way, this tool reports it honestly instead of guessing or erroring out.
What exactly is EXIF?
Exchangeable Image File Format — a block of metadata most digital cameras and phones embed directly inside a JPEG at capture time. It typically includes the camera make and model, the date and time, and capture settings like exposure time, aperture, ISO, and focal length, and it can optionally include GPS coordinates if location services were on.
Will this show me where a photo was taken?
If the photo has GPS tags embedded (many phone photos do, unless location was off or has since been stripped), yes — this tool decodes the latitude and longitude and shows them as coordinates. That's exactly why the local-only processing matters: those coordinates are genuinely sensitive, and this page is built so they're computed in your browser and never transmitted.
Why does exposure time show as a fraction like "1/125 s" instead of a decimal?
That's how cameras store it and how photographers read it. EXIF keeps exposure time as a RATIONAL — a numerator and a denominator, like 1 and 125 — and this tool reduces that fraction and displays it the way a camera's own screen would, rather than showing an unfamiliar decimal like 0.008.