EXIF Data Explained

Q: What is the difference between DateTime and DateTimeOriginal?

DateTimeOriginal (0x9003) is when the shutter fired, and editors leave it alone. DateTime (0x0132) is when the file was last changed — ExifTool shows it as ModifyDate. A camera sets both to the same value; a photo that has been re-saved has a later DateTime. If you want to know when a photo was taken, read DateTimeOriginal.

EXIF is the block of technical data your camera writes inside the photo file the moment you press the shutter. This page is the reference: what every field means, where it physically lives in the file, which apps read it and which quietly delete it, and what it can give away about you.

EXIF in one paragraph

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. It is a metadata standard — maintained today by Japan's CIPA and JEITA — that defines a set of named fields, called tags, and where to put them inside an image file. A typical phone photo carries somewhere between thirty and a few hundred of them. They record the device (make, model, serial number), the exposure (shutter, aperture, ISO, focal length), the time (to the second, sometimes with timezone), the place (GPS latitude, longitude, altitude, compass bearing), and the image structure (orientation, colour space, embedded thumbnail). The data is invisible when you look at the photo and travels with the file wherever you send it.

Jump to the eight fields people look up, the full field glossary, how to read it in practice, how cameras write it, which apps read vs strip it, or the privacy risks. Or open a photo in the viewer and read along with your own file.

The Most Common EXIF Fields, in Plain English

A phone photo can hold a few hundred tags, but eight of them answer almost every question anyone actually asks of a file. Here they are without the jargon. The full glossary below has the rest, with tag IDs and the directory each one sits in.

Field	What it tells you	Example	Lives in
Make	The brand that built the camera or phone.	Apple	IFD0
Model	Which device exactly. Specific enough to name the phone or the camera body, and it survives cropping and resizing.	iPhone 15 Pro	IFD0
DateTimeOriginal	The moment the shutter fired, to the second. This is the real answer to "when was this taken" — editors leave it alone, unlike `DateTime`, which moves every time the file is re-saved.	2024:03:15 14:23:01	Exif SubIFD
GPSLatitude / GPSLongitude	Where you were standing, as coordinates the device believed accurate to a few metres. Only present if location was switched on — and the most sensitive thing in the file.	40 deg 44' 54.36" N	GPS IFD
ExposureTime	How long the shutter stayed open, in seconds. 1/1000 freezes a bird in flight; 1/15 handheld is usually blurry.	1/125	Exif SubIFD
FocalLength	How wide or how zoomed-in the shot was, in millimetres. Small is wide, large is distant. Phone numbers look tiny because the lenses are tiny, which is what `FocalLengthIn35mmFilm` exists to rescale.	6.9 mm	Exif SubIFD
ISO	How hard the camera amplified the sensor signal. 50–200 means there was plenty of light; 3200 and up means it was dark and the photo will be grainy. The standard calls this field `PhotographicSensitivity`; every viewer labels it ISO.	200	Exif SubIFD
Flash	Whether the flash fired — stored as a number rather than a yes/no, because it also records whether it was forced on, switched off, or whether the camera saw the light bounce back.	Off, did not fire	Exif SubIFD

Four of these — shutter, focal length, ISO, flash — are settings rather than facts about you, and camera settings in EXIF reads them as photography. The location tags get their own treatment in what is GPS EXIF data. And if your photo has been through an editor, some of what you see may not be EXIF at all but IPTC or XMP sitting in a different block of the same file.

What Every EXIF Field Means

EXIF tags are not one flat list. They live in separate directories inside the file — IFD0 for the main image, an Exif sub-directory for camera settings, a GPS directory, and IFD1 for the thumbnail. The tables below follow that structure, because it is the same grouping ExifTool and most viewers use, and it explains why two similar fields (DateTime and DateTimeOriginal) can disagree. Tag IDs are given in hex, as they appear in the standard.

IFD0 — the main image directory

Inherited from TIFF. These describe the file and its provenance rather than the exposure.

Field	Tag	What it means	Example
Make	0x010F	Manufacturer of the device that captured the image.	Apple
Model	0x0110	The specific body or phone model.	iPhone 15 Pro
Orientation	0x0112	How the camera was held, as a value from 1 to 8. Viewers rotate the pixels on display rather than the file rotating itself — which is why a photo can look upright on your phone and sideways on a website that ignores the flag.	6 (rotate 90° CW)
XResolution / YResolution	0x011A / 0x011B	Print density, paired with `ResolutionUnit`. It says nothing about how detailed the image is — a 72 here does not mean a low-quality photo.	72, inches
Software	0x0131	Firmware version, or the last application to write the file.	17.4.1
DateTime	0x0132	When the file was last changed — ExifTool calls it `ModifyDate`. Cameras set it equal to capture time; editors bump it on save. If it is later than `DateTimeOriginal`, the photo has been re-saved.	2024:03:15 14:23:01
Artist / Copyright	0x013B / 0x8298	Photographer name and rights string. Set in the camera menu, so they persist across every shot until changed.	Jane Doe
HostComputer	0x013C	The machine that processed the image. Apple writes the phone model here as well as in `Model`.	iPhone 15 Pro

Exif SubIFD — time and exposure

The heart of EXIF. Everything the camera knew about the shot at the instant it fired. Our guide to camera settings in EXIF covers how to read these as photography rather than as data.

Field	Tag	What it means	Example
DateTimeOriginal	0x9003	The second the shutter fired. This is the field that means "when was this photo taken" — and the one editors leave alone.	2024:03:15 14:23:01
DateTimeDigitized	0x9004	When the image was digitised. Identical to the above on a digital camera; on a scan of a negative it is the scan date.	2024:03:15 14:23:01
OffsetTimeOriginal	0x9011	Timezone offset for the capture time. Added in EXIF 2.31 (2016) — before that, EXIF timestamps had no timezone at all, which is why old photos are ambiguous by up to a day.	-05:00
SubSecTimeOriginal	0x9291	Fractional seconds. Useful for ordering burst frames that share the same second.	742
ExposureTime	0x829A	Shutter speed in seconds, stored as a fraction.	1/125
FNumber	0x829D	Aperture as an f-stop. Smaller number, wider opening, more light.	f/1.8
PhotographicSensitivity	0x8827	Sensor sensitivity. Called `ISOSpeedRatings` before EXIF 2.3 renamed it; most viewers still label it ISO.	200
ExposureProgram	0x8822	Which mode the dial was on, as an integer: 1 manual, 2 program, 3 aperture priority, 4 shutter priority.	2 (program)
ExposureBiasValue	0x9204	Exposure compensation the photographer dialled in, in stops.	-0.3 EV
MeteringMode	0x9207	How the camera measured light: 2 centre-weighted, 3 spot, 5 pattern/matrix.	5 (pattern)
Flash	0x9209	A bitfield, not a yes/no. The lowest bit says whether the flash fired; the rest record whether it was forced, suppressed, or whether return light was detected.	16 (off, did not fire)
FocalLength	0x920A	Actual focal length of the lens, in millimetres.	6.9 mm
FocalLengthIn35mmFilm	0xA405	The same lens expressed as its full-frame equivalent, so you can compare a phone to an SLR.	24 mm
LensModel / LensMake	0xA434 / 0xA433	The lens as the body identified it. On phones this names the individual camera module.	iPhone 15 Pro back camera 6.86mm f/1.78
BodySerialNumber	0xA431	Serial number of the camera body. A unique identifier that links every photo you have ever published to the same physical camera.	XK4928571
LensSerialNumber	0xA435	The same, for the lens.	0000c15678
ColorSpace	0xA001	1 means sRGB. 65535 means "uncalibrated", which in practice usually signals Adobe RGB or Display P3 and sends the reader to the ICC profile instead.	1 (sRGB)
WhiteBalance / ExposureMode	0xA403 / 0xA402	0 auto, 1 manual. `ExposureMode` adds 2 for auto-bracket.	0 (auto)
UserComment	0x9286	A free-text field. Software drops all sorts of things here — including, on some AI image tools, the generation prompt.	—
MakerNote	0x927C	One tag the standard sets aside for the manufacturer to fill with whatever it likes, in whatever format it likes. Often the largest block in the file. See EXIF data by camera brand.	(binary)

GPS IFD — the location directory

A separate directory with its own numbering, so 0x0002 here is latitude, not something in IFD0. This is the block worth understanding before you post a photo of your house.

Field	Tag	What it means	Privacy risk
GPSLatitude / GPSLongitude	0x0002 / 0x0004	Coordinates as three rationals — degrees, minutes, seconds. Sign is not stored here: the paired `GPSLatitudeRef` (N or S) and `GPSLongitudeRef` (E or W) carry the hemisphere. Strip one and keep the other and you get a coordinate mirrored across the equator.	High
GPSAltitude	0x0006	Metres above sea level; `GPSAltitudeRef` flips it to below. In a tall building this can imply a floor.	High
GPSTimeStamp / GPSDateStamp	0x0007 / 0x001D	The satellite clock, always UTC. Compare it with `DateTimeOriginal` and you recover the timezone the camera was set to, even on files with no offset tag.	Medium
GPSImgDirection	0x0011	Compass bearing the camera was pointed, 0–360°. `GPSImgDirectionRef` says whether that is true north (T) or magnetic (M).	Medium
GPSHPositioningError	0x001F	The device's own estimate of horizontal error, in metres. A small value here is the camera telling you the fix is precise.	Medium
GPSProcessingMethod	0x001B	How the fix was obtained — a satellite lock, a cell tower, a Wi-Fi lookup, or a coordinate typed in by hand.	Low
GPSSpeed / GPSSpeedRef	0x000D / 0x000C	Speed of the receiver at capture, in km/h, mph, or knots. Mostly seen on drones and action cameras.	Low

Not every geotagged photo carries every field, and a missing GPSLatitude does not mean the photo is anonymous — GPSProcessingMethod or a stale GPSDateStamp can survive a partial strip. What is GPS EXIF data covers this directory tag by tag, and GPS data in photos goes deeper on how the coordinates get there.

IFD1 — the thumbnail directory

A second, near-complete image directory describing a small preview — typically 160×120 pixels — embedded in the file so a camera can draw a gallery without decoding full-size JPEGs. Its fields are mostly the JPEG offset and length, JPEGInterchangeFormat and JPEGInterchangeFormatLength.

It matters for one reason: the thumbnail is a separate image. An editor that crops the main photo but forgets to regenerate IFD1 leaves the original, uncropped scene sitting inside the file. This is not theoretical — in 2003 the TV presenter Cat Schwartz published headshots cropped from photos she had taken of herself, and readers extracted the untouched originals straight out of the EXIF thumbnail. Modern editors regenerate it, but "modern" is doing work in that sentence.

How to Read This in Practice

A glossary tells you what each field is. Reading a file is a different skill: the fields corroborate each other, and the interesting conclusions come from comparing two of them rather than looking at either alone. Below is a real-shaped EXIF dump from a JPEG — trimmed to the tags that carry meaning — and then what an experienced reader takes from it.

$ exiftool -a -G1 -s IMG_2094.JPG

[IFD0]      Make                    : Apple
[IFD0]      Model                   : iPhone 15 Pro
[IFD0]      Software                : 17.4.1
[IFD0]      Orientation             : Rotate 90 CW
[IFD0]      ModifyDate              : 2024:03:15 14:23:01
[ExifIFD]   DateTimeOriginal        : 2024:03:15 14:23:01
[ExifIFD]   OffsetTimeOriginal      : -04:00
[ExifIFD]   SubSecTimeOriginal      : 742
[ExifIFD]   ExposureTime            : 1/125
[ExifIFD]   FNumber                 : 1.8
[ExifIFD]   ISO                     : 200
[ExifIFD]   ExposureProgram         : Program AE
[ExifIFD]   MeteringMode            : Multi-segment
[ExifIFD]   Flash                   : Off, Did not fire
[ExifIFD]   FocalLength             : 6.9 mm
[ExifIFD]   FocalLengthIn35mmFormat : 24 mm
[ExifIFD]   LensModel               : iPhone 15 Pro back camera 6.86mm f/1.78
[GPS]       GPSLatitudeRef          : North
[GPS]       GPSLatitude             : 40 deg 44' 54.36"
[GPS]       GPSLongitudeRef         : West
[GPS]       GPSLongitude            : 73 deg 59' 8.36"
[GPS]       GPSAltitudeRef          : Above Sea Level
[GPS]       GPSAltitude             : 17.8 m
[GPS]       GPSDateStamp            : 2024:03:15
[GPS]       GPSTimeStamp            : 18:23:01
[GPS]       GPSImgDirectionRef      : True North
[GPS]       GPSImgDirection         : 291.4
[GPS]       GPSHPositioningError    : 4.7 m
[IFD1]      ThumbnailImage          : (Binary data 8482 bytes)

The bracketed prefix is the directory the tag came from — the same IFD0 / Exif SubIFD / GPS / IFD1 grouping as the glossary above. Our viewer shows you the same groups with friendlier labels; ExifTool uses its own names for a few tags, which is why DateTime appears here as ModifyDate and FocalLengthIn35mmFilm as FocalLengthIn35mmFormat. Same tag, different label.

1. Software tells you whether a computer has touched it

Software: 17.4.1 is an iOS version number, not an application name. The photo came off the phone and went nowhere else. Had it been through Lightroom or Photoshop, that field would say so — editors overwrite it with their own name and version on export.

2. Two timestamps that agree mean the file has not been re-saved

ModifyDate and DateTimeOriginal are identical here, which is what a camera writes and what an untouched file keeps. A ModifyDate hours or years later than DateTimeOriginal is the single easiest sign that something re-wrote the file after capture. It does not say what, only that it happened.

3. The GPS clock gives you the timezone back

DateTimeOriginal is local wall-clock time with no zone attached. GPSTimeStamp is always UTC. Subtract one from the other:

18:23:01 UTC − 14:23:01 local = 4 hours → UTC−04:00

Which matches OffsetTimeOriginal: -04:00, so the two are consistent. That subtraction is worth knowing because OffsetTimeOriginal only arrived in EXIF 2.31 — older files have no zone tag at all, and the GPS clock is the only way to recover it. A −04:00 in mid-March also implies a zone observing daylight saving, which narrows the geography before you look at a single coordinate.

4. The exposure block reads as one sentence

1/125 at f/1.8, ISO 200, flash off, 24 mm equivalent, Program AE: a handheld wide shot in available light with the camera making the decisions. The tell is the ISO. Bright sunshine on a phone gives you ISO 32 to 64; 200 says shade, indoors, or late in the day — and the aperture pinned wide open at f/1.8 says the camera was gathering what light it could. Camera settings in EXIF works through these as photography rather than as tags.

5. The GPS block is more than a coordinate

The hemisphere lives in the separate Ref tags, so the position is only complete when you read both halves. The numbers are degrees, minutes and seconds — map sites want decimal, which is 40.748433, −73.985656 here. Then three extras most people skip: an altitude, a bearing of 291.4° true, meaning the camera was pointed west-north-west, and GPSHPositioningError: 4.7 m— the phone's own statement that this fix is accurate to within about five metres. A coordinate plus a bearing does not say which building you were near; it says which window you were photographing. What is GPS EXIF data covers the conversion and the rest of the directory.

6. Read what is missing, too

No Artist and no Copyright: nothing in this file claims to own it. Photographers set those in the camera menu, or in the IPTC and XMP blocks, which live elsewhere in the same file and will not appear in an EXIF-only dump. No BodySerialNumber either — phones generally omit it where interchangeable-lens cameras write it every time. And that last line is a second, complete 8 KB image sitting inside the file: if this photo were ever cropped by a tool that did not regenerate the thumbnail, the uncropped scene would still be in there.

All of it in one sentence: an unedited iPhone 15 Pro JPEG, shot handheld in soft light at 14:23:01 local time on 15 March 2024, from a spot the phone places within five metres, facing west-north-west — and it still carries a thumbnail of whatever was in frame. None of that required a special tool or a single guess. It is all sitting in the file, and the same reading works on yours.

Check your own photo's EXIF data

Drop a file into the viewer and walk the six checks above against your own dump — the timestamps, the software, the exposure, the GPS block. It runs entirely in your browser; the photo is never uploaded.

Open Photo Metadata Viewer

How Cameras Write EXIF Data

When the shutter closes, the image processor does two jobs at once. It turns sensor readings into a compressed image, and it polls everything else the device knows — the lens position, the exposure the meter chose, the clock, the GPS receiver, the accelerometer that decides which way is up — and serialises that into a metadata block. Both are written into one file.

In a JPEG, that block goes in an application segment called APP1, marked by the bytes FF E1 near the very start of the file, before any pixel data. Inside it is the ASCII string Exif\0\0, and after that something surprising: a complete, self-contained TIFF file header. EXIF did not invent a container. It reused TIFF's.

What that header contains, in order:

Two bytes of byte order: II for little-endian (Intel) or MM for big-endian (Motorola). Every number that follows must be read in that order. Canon writes II; some Nikon bodies write MM. A reader that assumes one gets garbage from the other.
The number 42, as a sanity check that you read the byte order correctly.
An offset to IFD0, the first image file directory.
Each IFD is a count followed by 12-byte entries: two bytes of tag ID, two of data type, four of component count, four for the value. If the value fits in four bytes it sits right there; if not, those four bytes are an offset to where the value actually lives.
Each IFD ends with a pointer to the next one, which is how IFD0 reaches the thumbnail directory IFD1. The Exif SubIFD and GPS IFD hang off IFD0 as pointer tags rather than as siblings.

Two consequences fall straight out of that design. APP1 is capped at roughly 64 KB, which is why the embedded thumbnail is postage-stamp sized and why bulky data goes elsewhere. And because values are reached by absolute offsets, moving the block breaks anything that stored its own offsets internally — exactly what most MakerNotes do. Re-save a photo in an editor that rebuilds the EXIF block, and the maker notes can be silently corrupted or dropped even though nothing asked to delete them.

Other formats, same tags, different envelope

The tag glossary above is universal. Where the block is glued in is not:

TIFF needs no envelope — the file already is one.
HEIC and AVIF keep it as an item in the ISO base media container, which lifts the 64 KB ceiling.
WebP stores it in a RIFF chunk named EXIF.
PNG was retrofitted with an eXIf chunk. Older PNGs predate it and carry no EXIF at all — which is why a screenshot usually looks empty in a viewer.
RAW files (CR2, NEF, ARW) are TIFF variants built around the EXIF structure, so they carry the most complete metadata of anything on this list.

The camera is not the only writer

Every program that touches the file afterwards can add, change, or delete tags. Lightroom stamps Software. Phone galleries write GPS after the fact from a location track. Editors refresh DateTime on every export. And a photo that never saw a lens — a scan, a screenshot, an AI generation — can still carry EXIF, because EXIF is just bytes anyone may write.

Which is the honest answer to whether EXIF proves anything: it records what the writing software claimed, not what happened. Our guides on changing the EXIF date and time and working out when a photo was taken cover both sides of that.

Which Apps Read EXIF, and Which Strip It

Two questions people conflate. Reading is about whether an app will show you the metadata. Stripping is about whether an app deletes it from a copy it passes on. An app can do both, one, or neither — Apple Photos reads EXIF happily and strips nothing unless you ask.

Apps that read EXIF

App	How much it shows
ExifTool	Everything, including decoded MakerNotes for hundreds of camera models. The reference implementation; when tools disagree, it is right.
This site's viewer	Every standard tag plus GPS and thumbnail, parsed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Apple Photos / Preview	Common fields via the Info panel, and a map for GPS. No MakerNotes.
Windows File Explorer	A curated subset in Properties → Details. It hides anything it has no property handler for.
Lightroom / Capture One	Full standard set plus lens corrections read from MakerNotes.
Google Photos	Camera, exposure, and location in the info pane — and uses the timestamp to sort your library.

Step-by-step instructions for each platform are in how to read EXIF data.

Who strips it, and who does not

Where the photo goes	EXIF behaviour
Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok	Strip EXIF from what they serve to other users.
WhatsApp, Signal	Strip EXIF from photos sent inline.
Any chat app, sending "as a file"	Preserves everything. Choosing "document" instead of "photo" skips the re-encode that would have stripped it.
Email, Slack, Discord	Preserve EXIF. An attachment is the bytes you attached.
Flickr, 500px, SmugMug	Preserve EXIF deliberately — photographers want it shown.
Your own website or CMS	Whatever the image pipeline does. Most preserve by default.

"The platform strips it" is not the same as "the platform never had it." A social network removing EXIF before serving your photo to other users has already received the original, GPS and all, on its own servers. Stripping protects you from the other users, not from the company.

And the behaviour changes without announcement. The safe habit is to strip locally, once, and stop having to track which app is doing what this year. The platform-by-platform breakdown has the current detail, including the quirks around Reddit and Marketplace listings.

Find out what is actually in your photo

Drop a file into the viewer and read every field in this glossary against your own image. It runs entirely in your browser — the photo is never uploaded.

Open the EXIF Viewer

EXIF Data and Privacy Risks

The risk is not that one field is dangerous. It is that the fields combine, and that they are exact where memory is vague.

Location, to the metre

A geotagged photo does not say "taken in Dallas." It gives a coordinate pair a phone believed accurate to a few metres, and often the compass bearing you were facing. Post enough photos from home and the cluster is your address. The canonical demonstration: in 2012 Vice published a photo of the fugitive John McAfee taken on an iPhone, with the GPS tags intact, and readers had his location in Guatemala within hours.

Serial numbers, which link photos to each other

BodySerialNumber and LensSerialNumber are stable identifiers. A photo posted under a pseudonym and a photo on your professional portfolio, both from the same body, share a serial. That is a deanonymising link no amount of care with your name can undo, and it survives cropping.

Timestamps, which build a timeline

DateTimeOriginal to the second, plus SubSecTimeOriginal, plus the UTC GPSTimeStamp, places you somewhere at a time precisely enough to confirm or contradict an account of your movements. Harmless until it is not.

Data you thought you had removed

The embedded thumbnail can predate your crop. A partial strip can leave the hemisphere refs behind. And Windows Explorer's own metadata remover deletes the directory entries while leaving the string values in the file, where a hex editor still finds them — the details are in our Windows removal guide. Verify a strip; do not assume one.

None of this argues for deleting EXIF from everything. It is what lets you learn from your own photography, sort a library by capture date, and prove a photo is yours. The sane position is to know what a given file carries before it leaves your machine — which is a question you can answer in about five seconds. Our photo privacy guide has the full checklist, and remove photo metadata covers stripping on every platform.

Related Guides

Online EXIF Viewer

Read every field in this glossary against your own photo, in the browser, with no upload.

What Is EXIF Data?

The shorter introduction, plus which file formats support EXIF and which do not.

Camera Settings in EXIF

Aperture, ISO, shutter speed and focal length read as photography rather than as tags.

What Is GPS EXIF Data?

The GPS directory tag by tag, plotted on a map — and what a shared photo gives away.

What Is IPTC Data?

The other block in the same file: caption, keywords, credit, and the copyright fields a human adds.

What Is XMP Data?

Adobe's XML container — and where a second copy of your GPS hides after you strip EXIF.

GPS Data in Photos

How coordinates get embedded, what they reveal, and how to turn geotagging off.

EXIF Data by Camera Brand

What Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, and Apple each hide in the MakerNote block.

Remove Photo Metadata

Strip EXIF on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, and Android — and verify it worked.

Photo Privacy Guide

What your photos reveal about you, and a checklist for sharing them safely.

How to Read EXIF Data

Step-by-step for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, and the web.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is EXIF data in simple terms?

EXIF data is a set of hidden notes your camera writes inside the photo file when you take the picture. It records the device, the exposure settings, the exact date and time, and — if location is switched on — the GPS coordinates. You cannot see it by looking at the photo, but any EXIF viewer can read it back out, and it travels with the file when you send it.

What does EXIF stand for?

Exchangeable Image File Format. It is a specification maintained by CIPA and JEITA in Japan that defines the metadata tags and where they sit inside an image file. The current version, EXIF 3.0, was published in 2023 and added support for UTF-8 text.

Where is EXIF data stored inside a photo file?

In a JPEG, it lives in an application segment called APP1, near the start of the file and before the pixel data. That segment contains a complete TIFF header, and the tags are organised into directories: IFD0 for the image, an Exif SubIFD for exposure, a GPS IFD for location, and IFD1 for the embedded thumbnail. HEIC, WebP, and PNG use the same tags but wrap them differently.

What is the difference between DateTime and DateTimeOriginal?

DateTimeOriginal (0x9003) is when the shutter fired, and editors leave it alone. DateTime (0x0132) is when the file was last changed — ExifTool shows it as ModifyDate. A camera sets both to the same value; a photo that has been re-saved has a later DateTime. If you want to know when a photo was taken, read DateTimeOriginal.

Which apps strip EXIF data automatically?

Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok strip EXIF from the images they serve to other users. WhatsApp and Signal strip it from photos sent inline. Email, Slack, Discord, Flickr, and most self-hosted sites preserve it in full — as does any chat app when you send the image "as a file" rather than as a photo. Note that a platform stripping EXIF before publishing still received your original, coordinates included.

Is EXIF data a privacy risk?

It can be. GPS coordinates are the obvious one — accurate to a few metres, and a cluster of photos from home is your address. Less obvious: the camera body serial number links photos across accounts and pseudonyms, and an embedded thumbnail can preserve the scene you cropped out. For everyday snaps this rarely matters. For anything published under a name that is not yours, strip the file first and verify the strip.

Can EXIF data be trusted as proof of when or where a photo was taken?

Not on its own. Every tag can be edited with freely available tools, and a file that never saw a camera — a screenshot, a scan, an AI generation — can carry a full set of plausible EXIF. It is useful supporting evidence, especially when several independent fields agree, but it records what the writing software claimed, not what happened.

What is the difference between EXIF, IPTC, and XMP?

EXIF is the technical data the camera records at capture. IPTC holds editorial information a human adds — caption, keywords, credit, copyright. XMP is Adobe's extensible XML format, used for edit history, ratings, and anything the other two have no field for. A single JPEG can carry all three at once, in different segments, which is why stripping EXIF alone does not necessarily leave a clean file.

See the glossary against your own photo

Every field above, decoded from your file, in your browser. No upload, no account, no install.

Open Photo Metadata Viewer