Private photo metadata check

EXIF viewer

See whether a photo carries the place, time and device it was taken with — and remove them in one click.

Drop one or more photos here

JPG, PNG or WebP · up to 25.0 MB each

What a photo can say about you

Alongside the picture, most camera and phone photos carry a block of text called EXIF: notes the device writes about how and where the shot was taken. None of it is visible when you look at the image, and much of it is harmless — exposure, lens, white balance. Six kinds of field are not harmless once a photo leaves your hands, and they are what the privacy check above looks for:

  • Location. GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. A picture taken at home and posted publicly can reveal the address.
  • Date and time. When the shot was taken, to the second. A series of photos can sketch out a routine.
  • Device model. The make and model of the camera or phone.
  • Serial number. Some cameras record their own serial number, which can link photos posted under different names back to one device.
  • Owner or author name. Cameras and editing apps can stamp a name or copyright line into every file.
  • Editing software. The app that last saved the file, which can contradict a claim that a photo is unedited.

How precise the location in a photo is

GPS coordinates are stored as degrees, minutes, and seconds. One second of latitude is about 31 metres north to south, so a photo that records whole seconds — as our sample does — already places you within a single building. Coordinates stored with fractions of a second narrow it further, to a few metres. The viewer shows coordinates to five decimal places, which is a resolution of roughly one metre; the real accuracy depends on the GPS fix the device had when the photo was taken, and indoors it is often worse.

The “Show on OpenStreetMap” link is the only part of this page that sends anything anywhere, and only when you click it: the coordinates go to openstreetmap.org so it can draw the map.

What we tested

The “Try a sample photo” button loads a JPEG we built with a real EXIF block: an invented camera called BravoCam BC-900 Demo, a capture time, a rotation flag, and the coordinates of Trafalgar Square — a public landmark, chosen so the sample points nowhere private. It carries 8 metadata fields in a 245-byte block.

We then pushed that file through the same decode-and-redraw path the Image Converter uses and read the result back with the same parser this viewer uses. None of the 8 fields survived, GPS included. One thing surprised us: the cleaned file was 14% larger than the original (9,670 bytes before, 11,024 after), because re-encoding the picture costs more than the small metadata block it removed. Removing metadata is a privacy step, not a way to make files smaller. The full experiment is written up in the EXIF and privacy guide.

Why this viewer never uploads the photo

An online metadata checker that uploads your photo sends the very information you are trying to check — your location, your device — to someone else's server. This one reads the file inside your browser. The image is opened from your device, its metadata is decoded in memory, and closing the tab discards it.

Each format keeps its metadata in a different place. JPEG stores EXIF in a segment near the start of the file, PNG in a chunk named eXIf, and WebP in a chunk named EXIF inside its RIFF container. The parsing library this tool uses reads JPEG and PNG but not WebP, so for WebP files the viewer finds the EXIF chunk itself and hands its contents to the parser. We checked all three formats with the same metadata block and got the same fields back from each.

What metadata cannot tell you

  • What is in the picture. A clean result here does not mean the photo is anonymous. Street signs, house numbers, reflections, and faces are part of the pixels, and no metadata tool will flag them.
  • Manufacturer notes. Many cameras add a proprietary “maker note” in their own undocumented format. This viewer does not decode it, so a camera-specific detail stored only there will not appear.
  • Embedded thumbnails. Some cameras store a small preview image inside the file. If the photo was cropped in an app that did not update that preview, the preview can still show the uncropped original. The viewer does not extract it; converting the file with the Image Converter removes it along with everything else.
  • Other formats. The viewer accepts JPG, PNG, and WebP, the same formats as the rest of BravoConvert.

Troubleshooting

  • “No identifying metadata found” on a phone photo. The app that last saved the file — a messaging app, a screenshot tool, an editor — may already have removed it. Check the original from the camera roll if you need to know what it contained.
  • Location is missing on a photo you expected to have it. Location tagging can be switched off in the camera settings, and photos taken indoors may have had no GPS fix.
  • The file is rejected. Only JPG, PNG, and WebP up to 25 MB are accepted.

For questions, see the FAQ or the contact page — but please do not send the photo itself.