View EXIF Metadata

What your photos are carrying without telling you

Every photo a phone or camera takes has a second file inside it. EXIF metadata records the make and model of the device, the exact date and time to the second, the shutter speed, aperture and ISO, the lens, the orientation, the software that last touched it — and, if location services were on, the GPS coordinates where you stood, to within a few metres.

None of it is visible when you look at the picture. All of it travels with the file when you email it, upload it, or hand it over on a USB stick.

Why this is a privacy problem in practice

The coordinates are the sharp end. A photo of something for sale, taken at home, tells a stranger where you live. A picture posted from a hotel says which hotel and when. A set of holiday photos maps your movements by the second, and the timestamps say when your house was empty.

Most big social networks strip EXIF on upload — but 'most' is doing real work in that sentence, and it doesn't cover email attachments, cloud folder links, messaging apps that send the original, or the marketplace listing you thought was anonymous. The only reliable assumption is that the data is there until you've checked.

Reading the fields that matter

• GPS latitude/longitude — the one to check first. If it's there, the photo knows where it was taken.
• DateTimeOriginal — when the shutter fired, in the camera's local time, usually without a timezone.
• Make and Model — the device. Useful for pairing a photo to a person more often than people expect.
• Orientation — a rotation flag, not a rotated image. It's why a photo can look right on your phone and sideways in an old viewer that ignores the tag.
• Software — what edited it last, which is how 'unedited' photos are often caught.

Reading is the first half; removing is the second

This viewer reads the file in your browser and shows you what's in it. That's deliberately all it does — the photo is never uploaded, which would be a strange way to run a privacy tool.

When you want the data gone rather than just seen, Image Converter re-encodes the picture and drops the metadata with it, and Compress Image does the same as a side effect. Both rebuild the file from its pixels, so nothing from the original block survives. Check with this tool afterwards — verifying is cheap and assuming isn't.