How-to
Where was this photo taken?
Somebody sends you a photo and you want to know where it came from. Before you start studying the background, there is something quicker to do: read what the photo wrote down about itself.
Keep reading →
EXIF viewer and file metadata viewer
Drop a file and everything recorded inside it is laid out for you. Photos show capture settings and the place they were taken. Documents show who wrote them and how they were edited. The file announces what it is, so there is no format to pick.
No upload
File to inspect
Photos: JPG, PNG, WebP. Documents: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HWPX. Files open inside this browser and are never uploaded.
How to see what is written inside a file
- 1
Drop one file
Photos: JPG, PNG, WebP. Documents: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HWPX. The format is read from the file header, not from the name.
- 2
Read what came out
Fields are grouped by camera, capture settings, location and authorship. If coordinates are present, a map is drawn alongside them.
- 3
Strip it if you would rather not share it
The button at the bottom takes you to the metadata remover. Your original stays as it is and you download a cleaned copy.
What is actually inside a file
A photo carries more than the scene
Cameras and phones write a block of notes next to the pixels. That block, called EXIF, records when the shot was taken, which device took it, and what the aperture and shutter were. Depending on your settings it also carries the coordinates of the place and the serial number of the body.
The catch is that these notes usually survive copying and sharing. They are invisible on screen but they are still in the file. To know what the person receiving it can see, you have to be able to see it yourself first.
| Field | What it tells someone |
|---|---|
| Capture time | The date and time of the shot, as the device clock had it. No time zone is stored |
| Make and model | Which phone or camera took the picture |
| Body serial number | Lets anyone group every photo shot on the same device |
| Location | Latitude and longitude. Home and work addresses end up here |
| Software used | Which editor the file passed through |
| Hidden thumbnail | The preview image the camera embedded |
The location is drawn on a map
When coordinates are present, the spot is marked on a map. Raw numbers mean nothing at a glance, but a map answers the question immediately: is that my doorstep, my office, my child’s school?
Phones write coordinates by default once location permission is on. Some messaging apps strip them, plenty of others pass them straight through. This is how a home address leaks out of a listing photo or a blog post.
Drawing the map does send those coordinates to the map service. The file itself never leaves your browser, but map tiles have to come from a map server. If you would rather not tell anyone the coordinates, read the numbers and skip the map.
What you cropped out can survive in the thumbnail
Cameras embed a small preview so photos flick past quickly in a gallery. Crop the picture or paint over a face, and some editors never regenerate that preview. The old version stays inside the file.
Faces people thought they had covered and corners they thought they had cut have come back out of these thumbnails. So when a file has one, it is pulled out and shown next to the photo. Seeing it is faster than being told about it.
Documents remember who handled them
Word, Excel and PowerPoint write an author name into the file. The person who created it, the person who saved it last, the company name, how many times it was saved, and how long the document sat open in total are all in there.
That is how a proposal reused from another firm still carries that firm’s name, and how a report submitted at the deadline shows three minutes of total editing time. PDFs are no different: the producer field records which program built the file and what it was built from.
HWPX, the Korean word processing format, is XML in a zip and reads the same way. Pre-2007 .hwp files use a different structure and cannot be read yet.
Common questions
Is my file uploaded?+
No. Opening the file, pulling the values out and drawing them on screen all happen inside this browser. The one exception is the map: drawing it sends the coordinates to the map service. The file stays on your device either way.
Which files can I use?+
JPG, PNG and WebP for photos. PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and HWPX for documents. The format is detected from the file header rather than the extension, so a misnamed file still reads correctly.
Nothing came out at all.+
Either the metadata was already stripped, or the program that made the file does not write any. Photos that travelled through a messaging app or a social network usually lose theirs on the way. Files straight off a camera almost always keep theirs.
There is no location.+
The photo has no coordinates in it. Location permission was off, the camera app was set not to record them, or something removed them along the way. No coordinates means no map.
The capture time looks wrong.+
EXIF capture times carry no time zone. The value is whatever the device clock said. Rather than guessing a zone and shifting the time by hours, the stored value is shown as it is. That is why a holiday photo reads in local time.
Why not old .hwp files?+
Pre-2007 .hwp is a compound binary format rather than XML, and its document properties cannot be read yet. Convert it to HWPX and the author and dates will show up.
How do I remove what I just saw?+
The button at the bottom takes you to the metadata remover. It lifts out the records without touching a single pixel, so quality is unchanged. Your original stays and a cleaned copy is created.