How to use
- Drag a photo onto the drop area, or click it to browse — JPEG, TIFF, HEIC/HEIF, AVIF and PNG are all accepted.
- Selecting several files at once opens the first straight away and parks the rest under Queued files; press View beside any of them to inspect it next.
- Read the five panels — Camera, Capture settings, GPS location, Dates, and Software & authorship. The badge on the GPS panel says Location embedded or No location so you can judge exposure at a glance.
- Grab the results with Copy as text for a readable summary, or Download .json for the raw tag dump exactly as it was parsed.
- Hit Clear to release the file and blank every panel before loading the next one.
How it works
Metadata lives in a small header block at the front of an image file, separate from the pixels. When a file arrives, the viewer hands it to exifr, an open-source parser that walks the TIFF, EXIF and GPS segments of that header, then maps each raw tag key onto a labelled, formatted row. Raw EXIF values are rarely display-ready, so the tool reformats them on the way out.
Take a frame from a Fujifilm X-T5. Its EXIF might store ExposureTime as 0.008, FNumber as 5.6, ISO as 400 and FocalLength as 35. The Capture panel never prints those bare numbers: since 0.008 is below one second, the shutter formatter reports 1/125 s — because round(1 ÷ 0.008) = 125 — while aperture becomes f/5.6 and focal length picks up its unit as 35 mm. A DateTimeOriginal field arrives as a date object and is rendered as 2026-05-18 07:42:10.
GPS is the tag worth watching. exifr resolves the degrees-minutes-seconds rationals into a single signed decimal per axis; the viewer then reads the sign to pick a hemisphere letter. A latitude of -37.813611 and longitude of 144.963056 display as 37.813611° S, 144.963056° E, alongside a link that drops a pin on that exact point in OpenStreetMap. Miss either coordinate and the panel falls back to No location — no fabricated position.
Use cases & limitations
Photographers lean on this to confirm what a camera actually recorded — the ISO a shot was pushed to, the lens that was mounted, whether flash fired. Editors and researchers use it to sanity-check a photo’s claimed origin: a timestamp and a body serial number are hard evidence, and an embedded GPS fix can place a picture to within a building. Most people, though, open it for one reason — to see what a photo would tell a stranger before they post it.
The honest limits are worth stating. An empty result is not proof a file was never tagged; it usually means a platform or editor stripped the block earlier, so absence of evidence isn’t evidence the original lacked location. This page reads only — it cannot delete anything. When you want the tags gone, the EXIF remover re-encodes the image without its metadata block, and the image compressor shrinks a file while dropping most of it as a side effect. One more quirk: HEIC and TIFF thumbnails don’t preview in every browser, but their metadata still parses even when the little image stays blank.
Privacy note
The photo never leaves your device. It’s opened through the browser’s File API and parsed in the page; the exifr library itself (about 50 KB gzipped) is only fetched the moment a file is dropped, and no image data is sent anywhere before, during or after parsing. Copies and JSON downloads are generated locally too. If you’d rather check than trust, open your developer tools, watch the network tab, and load a dozen photos — you won’t see a single upload. For a wider look at what your browser alone reveals, the browser fingerprint tool shows the other half of the picture.