About photometadata.net

Every photo your phone or camera takes carries a block of hidden data: the GPS coordinates of where you stood, the exact time to the second, the camera and lens, and often a device serial number. Most people never see it, and most people are surprised by how much of it there is.

The metadata viewer at the centre of this site reads all of it in your browser and shows it to you field by field. Because the file is parsed locally with JavaScript, your photo is never uploaded — it does not leave your device, and we never see it. The same is true of the metadata remover, which strips the data out and hands you a clean copy to download.

Around those two tools sits a library of guides — how to read EXIF data on any device, what each EXIF field means, which social platforms strip metadata, and how different camera brands write their data.

Photo metadata sits in an awkward spot: it is genuinely useful — it is how you remember when and where a shot was taken, and how photographers assert copyright — and it is also a genuine privacy risk, because a single image posted publicly can reveal your home address through its GPS tag.

The tools that let you inspect it usually fall into two camps: command-line utilities that assume you already know what a tag is, or upload-based websites that ask you to send them your photos first. We wanted the third option — something that reads everything, explains it in words, and never touches your files. That is the whole site.

The guides aim to be correct first and readable second. Field names, tag numbers, and tool commands are checked against the actual standards and the tools themselves — where a page shows an ExifTool command, it is a command that runs. Where behaviour varies by platform or changes over time, we say so rather than stating a single answer as permanent fact.

We do not publish invented statistics or made-up prices. If a figure cannot be verified, it is left out. When we get something wrong, we would rather hear about it and fix it — the contact page is the way to do that.

photometadata.net is operated by Pond Software, an independent software maker. The site is free to use. It is supported by display advertising and by occasional affiliate links to relevant gear — neither of which changes what the tools do or costs you anything. How we handle data is set out in the privacy policy.