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See what a photo says about itself

Read the camera, lens, settings, timestamp and GPS coordinates stored inside a JPEG. Free, no signup, and the photo is read in your browser, not uploaded.

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    How it works

    A JPEG is a sequence of segments, and the one marked APP1 holds a small TIFF structure: a byte-order mark, then directories of tagged entries. The first directory describes the file, and two of its entries are pointers to further directories — one for the camera settings, one for the location. This reads all three, converts the rationals into the units a photographer recognises, and turns the degrees, minutes and seconds of a coordinate into a single decimal number you can paste into a map.

    What to watch out for

    Most images you meet carry nothing at all

    Anything that has been through a chat app, a social network or a converter has usually had its metadata stripped on the way, and every other tool on this site removes it as a side effect of re-encoding. An empty report is the common answer and it is a real one, not a failure to read the file.

    Maker notes are not decoded

    Camera manufacturers write a large private block whose format is undocumented and different for every brand and often every model. Rendering it by guesswork produces plausible-looking nonsense, so it is left alone. What you see here is the standard set of tags, which is where the camera, the moment, the settings and the location live.

    Only JPEG is read

    This walks the JPEG segment structure directly. PNG can carry an equivalent block and HEIC files from an iPhone certainly do, but both use a different container that this does not open. Converting a HEIC to JPEG elsewhere first will usually not help, because the conversion is what removes the data.

    Limits

    Files up to about 50 MB work reliably. Beyond that, the ceiling is your device's memory rather than any rule we impose — the work happens on your own machine. Tested in Chrome 140, Firefox 143, Safari 18.

    What is actually in there

    Press the shutter and the camera writes far more than pixels. It records itself — make, model, sometimes the serial number and the name entered as the owner. It records how the photograph was taken: shutter speed, aperture, sensitivity, focal length, whether the flash fired. It records when, to the second.

    And if location services were on, it records where, to within a few metres.

    None of this is visible when you look at the picture. All of it travels with the file when you send it to somebody, attach it to an email, or upload it to a forum that does not strip metadata.

    The line that matters

    The report leads with whether the file contains coordinates, because that is the question almost everyone arrives with. A photograph taken at home and posted publicly carries the address of the person who took it, expressed precisely enough to put a pin on a map.

    Coordinates are stored as three fractions — degrees, minutes and seconds — which is unreadable in raw form. They are converted here into the single decimal number that any mapping service accepts, so you can check for yourself exactly what the file is disclosing.

    Reading is separate from removing

    This tool only reads. It hands back a plain text report and leaves your picture exactly as it was, which is the right behaviour for checking something before you decide what to do about it.

    When the answer is that you would rather it were not there, the removal tool linked below takes the same segments out without decoding the image, so nothing about the picture itself changes.

    Read in this tab, like everything else here

    The file never leaves your browser. That would be a strange thing to compromise on for a tool whose entire subject is what a photograph reveals about the person who took it.

    Your files never leave your browser. Last updated 2026-08-07.