Image Info Viewer

Free Image Info Viewer - Extract Photo Metadata, EXIF Data & Details

View and extract complete information from your images including EXIF metadata, camera settings, GPS coordinates, shooting parameters, dimensions, file properties, and more. This free online image info viewer tool runs entirely in your browser with no server upload required - ensuring complete privacy and security. Perfect for photographers, developers, researchers, forensic analysis, verifying image authenticity, checking photo details, and understanding camera settings. Extract camera make and model, shooting date and time, exposure settings (ISO, aperture, shutter speed), focal length, GPS location data, lens information, white balance, flash settings, color space, orientation, and all embedded metadata. Export all data as JSON for further analysis or documentation. Process unlimited images with no registration and no hidden fees. Works with JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, and all common image formats that support metadata.

What metadata does my photo leak when I share it online?

A typical smartphone JPEG leaks more than you might expect: GPS coordinates of where the shot was taken (latitude, longitude, altitude, sometimes a heading), exact date and time with timezone offset, camera make and model, lens information, the device's serial number on some cameras, software version, owner name (if configured), and full exposure parameters. Recent iPhones and Android cameras also embed scene tags, depth maps, Live Photo references, and HEIC sidecar data. Most major social networks strip EXIF before public display — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit — but messaging apps like Telegram, WhatsApp ("send as document" mode), Signal, and email attachments often preserve everything. To check, upload to this tool or to any EXIF reader before sharing. To strip metadata, use the "Remove EXIF" feature, save as PNG (which has weaker metadata standards), or take a screenshot of the photo.

What's the difference between EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata?

Three overlapping standards each cover a different domain. EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format, JEITA CP-3451) is the camera-centric standard: shutter speed, aperture, ISO, GPS, make/model, datetime. It's automatically written by every camera and survives in JPEG, TIFF, HEIC, and WebP. IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council IIM standard from 1991) is the publishing-centric standard: photographer name, caption, keywords, copyright, location description, contact info — designed for newsroom workflows. XMP (Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform, ISO 16684) is the modern XML-based replacement that unifies both and adds editing history, ratings, color profiles, and any custom field. Lightroom, Bridge, and most pro tools write XMP; consumer cameras still primarily write EXIF. A modern JPEG often contains all three simultaneously, sometimes with conflicting values — XMP usually wins when readers disagree.

How can I check if a photo has been edited or AI-generated?

Metadata gives hints but isn't conclusive. Look for: "Software" tag (Photoshop, Lightroom, Topaz, DALL-E, Midjourney leave traces), "ModifyDate" different from "DateTimeOriginal" (indicates post-processing), missing camera Make/Model (rendered images often have none), suspicious color profiles (AI tools default to sRGB without ICC), and the absence of expected EXIF blocks for a claimed camera model. C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) signatures, supported by Adobe, Microsoft, Sony, and Leica cameras since 2024, embed a cryptographically signed history of edits in the manifest — this calculator displays C2PA claims when present. For deeper forensics, error level analysis (ELA), JPEG quantization table matching, and quantization noise patterns can reveal manipulations not declared in metadata. Many AI-generation services now legally must embed disclosure metadata under EU AI Act 2026.

Why doesn't my screenshot show camera EXIF data?

Screenshots are generated by the OS, not a camera, so they have no shutter speed, aperture, ISO, lens, or GPS to record. What screenshots typically include depends on platform: macOS adds the date taken, screen DPI, and color profile (Display P3 on modern Macs); iOS/iPadOS add device model, the screen capture timestamp, and color profile; Windows Snipping Tool adds creation date and sometimes the application name in PNG tEXt chunks; Android varies wildly by OEM. Screenshots are usually saved as PNG, which uses tEXt, zTXt, iTXt, and tIME chunks instead of EXIF. To check PNG metadata, use a tool that reads PNG ancillary chunks specifically — many EXIF readers ignore PNG entirely. If you need to prove a screenshot is unedited, save it to a location with a tamper-evident filesystem like APFS snapshots or upload to a notary service that hashes and timestamps.

What is the EXIF orientation flag and why do my photos sometimes appear sideways?

Cameras don't physically rotate the captured pixels when you turn the device — they just record the orientation in an EXIF tag (values 1-8: 1=normal, 3=180°, 6=rotate 90° CW, 8=rotate 90° CCW, plus mirror variants 2,4,5,7). Apps that respect this tag (Photos.app, modern browsers, Lightroom) auto-rotate for display; older apps and many image-processing libraries ignore it and show the pixels in their native sensor orientation, which makes portrait shots appear sideways. The fix is "lossless rotation" — re-encoding the JPEG with the pixels rotated to match the orientation flag set to 1. JPEG supports this without quality loss for rotations that are multiples of 8 pixels (most modern phone cameras shoot in 8-aligned dimensions). PNG has no orientation flag at all, so PNG photos from cameras are always pre-rotated. This is also why uploading from iPhone sometimes produces sideways images on older websites.

Can I trust the date/time in EXIF data for legal or forensic purposes?

Not without corroboration. EXIF datetime fields are written by the camera based on its internal clock, which users can set to any value, intentionally or accidentally. Most cameras don't sync to NTP or any trusted source, and the timezone tag (OffsetTime, added in EXIF 2.31) is often missing — leaving you guessing whether 14:30 is local or UTC. Editing software preserves DateTimeOriginal by default but writes a new ModifyDate, so a mismatch suggests post-processing. For legal evidence, courts typically want corroboration: file modification times on the original SD card, cloud upload timestamps (Google Photos, iCloud preserve the original EXIF), email/MMS delivery timestamps, or independent witness records. C2PA signatures with trusted timestamps (RFC 3161) are the new gold standard, but adoption is still partial. Treat EXIF datetime as informative, not authoritative.

What's the difference between an ICC color profile and a color space tag?

A color space tag ("sRGB", "AdobeRGB", "Display P3") is a label telling the renderer how to interpret the RGB values — it assumes a standard, well-known transformation. An ICC profile is a complete file (typically 500 bytes to several MB) embedded in the image, defining the exact mapping from device-RGB to a reference color space (CIE XYZ or Lab), including tone curves, primaries, and white point. Cameras and phones embed ICC profiles for accurate color rendering across screens and printers — Display P3 on iPhone covers about 25% more colors than sRGB. When you strip ICC profiles to save bytes, viewers default to assuming sRGB, which causes color shifts on wide-gamut images: skin tones look pinker, reds look orange, greens look toxic. Always preserve ICC profiles for portfolio photos, product shots, and print materials. Stripping is safe only for screen-only web images that were authored in sRGB to begin with.

How are HEIC, HEIF, and AVIF different from JPEG in terms of metadata?

HEIC (HEIF with HEVC encoding, default on iPhone since iOS 11), HEIF (ISO/IEC 23008-12 container), and AVIF (AV1 in HEIF container) all use the modern ISOBMFF box structure inherited from MP4 — fundamentally different from JPEG's segment-based APP markers. They can hold multiple images in one file (Live Photos, burst sequences, depth maps, alpha masks, derived thumbnails), each with its own metadata block. EXIF is stored inside an Exif item with type box, IPTC/XMP in separate items, and ICC profiles in colr boxes. The big practical difference: stripping HEIC metadata requires HEIF-aware tools — old JPEG metadata strippers do nothing. AVIF additionally supports HDR metadata (CICP, mastering display info, MaxCLL/MaxFALL) crucial for HDR10 and Dolby Vision delivery on the web. When converting HEIC to JPEG for compatibility, the second image in HEIC sequences (often a Live Photo's video frame) is silently dropped along with depth maps.