Photo GPS & EXIF Viewer
Drop a JPEG in and read what is hidden inside it — camera, lens, settings, date, and the coordinates of the exact spot it was taken. The file never leaves your browser.
Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.
The GPS tag on a photo taken at home is your home address
That is the whole reason this page exists, and it is why it has no upload button. A camera phone writes the coordinates of the shutter press into the file, to six decimal places — about ten centimetres. Not the neighbourhood: the room. People post photos of a new kitchen, a cat, a parcel that arrived, a child in a school uniform, and the file carries the exact spot it was taken along with the date and time. Anyone who downloads the original can read it in about four seconds, which is roughly how long this page took.
The second-order version is worse than the first. One photo gives one location. A set of photos gives a pattern: where you sleep, where the children go, what time you leave, which weeks you are away. None of that is in the picture. All of it is in the file.
Which platforms strip it and which do not
- Usually stripped. The big social platforms re-encode what you upload and the metadata does not survive: Facebook, Instagram and X all drop EXIF from the copy other people can download. WhatsApp and Signal re-compress photos and drop it too.
- Usually kept. Email attachments. Cloud storage — Drive, Dropbox, iCloud — keeps the original, which is the point of it. Sending a photo "as a file" or "as a document" in a messenger deliberately bypasses the re-encoding, and keeps everything. Forums, wikis, marketplace listings and most self-hosted sites keep whatever you gave them.
- The dangerous middle. A platform stripping EXIF from the public copy does not mean it did not read the location first and keep it for itself. Stripping protects you from other users. It does not protect you from the platform.
And all of that changes without announcement. The reliable move is not to remember which app is safe this year — it is to take the location out before the photo leaves your device.
How to strip it yourself
On Windows, right-click the file, Properties, Details, then "Remove Properties and Personal Information", which will write you a clean copy. On macOS, open it in Preview, Tools, Show Inspector, and remove the location on the GPS tab. On an iPhone, use the share sheet, tap Options at the top, and turn Location off before you send. In Google Photos the share menu has a "Remove location" toggle. If you do this often, exiftool -all= photo.jpg clears everything in one go. And the crude version that always works: take a screenshot of the photo and send the screenshot, because a screenshot has no EXIF at all.
What the fields actually mean
Shutter, aperture and ISO are the exposure triangle and together they tell you how the shot was made — 1/2000 at f/2.8 is bright daylight and a wide lens; 1/15 at f/1.8 and ISO 6400 is a dim room and a shaky hand. Focal length tells you how far away the photographer was standing. Orientation is a flag saying which way up the camera was held, which is why a photo can look right in one app and sideways in another: the pixels never rotated, only the flag says they should be. The date is the camera's clock, which is wrong more often than you would think and never carries a time zone in the base field.
Why some files have nothing in them
No EXIF is normal and is not a sign of tampering. Screenshots never have it. Anything exported by an editor, resized by a CMS, or passed through a messaging app has usually lost it. Images generated rather than photographed have none to begin with. The absence proves nothing except that the block is not there — and equally, EXIF can be edited, so its presence proves nothing either. It is a hint, not evidence.
Questions people ask
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No, and that is not a promise about our server — there is no server. The file is read with the browser’s own FileReader into memory, the bytes are parsed by the JavaScript on this page, and nothing is transmitted. You can check by opening your browser’s network tab, or by turning off your connection and loading a photo anyway. It will still work.
Why does it say there is no EXIF?
Most likely because there is none. Screenshots, images re-saved by an editor, and photos that have been through a social platform or a messaging app usually have had the block removed. It can also happen if the file is a PNG or HEIC renamed to .jpg, in which case the page will tell you what it actually found.
Does it work on HEIC photos from an iPhone?
No. HEIC stores its metadata in a completely different container, and this reader walks the JPEG APP1 segment specifically. If you share or export the photo as a JPEG first, the EXIF normally comes with it — which is itself worth knowing, because "I converted it" is not the same as "I cleaned it".
How accurate are the GPS coordinates?
As accurate as the phone was when it took the shot: typically three to ten metres outdoors with a clear sky, much worse indoors or between tall buildings, where the position may come from wifi networks instead and be out by a block. The tag is written to six decimal places regardless, which looks far more precise than it is.
Can I trust EXIF as proof of when or where a photo was taken?
No. Every field can be edited with free software, and the timestamp is whatever the camera’s clock said. EXIF is useful for organising your own photos and for finding out what you are accidentally sharing. It is not evidence, and anyone treating it as evidence is making an assumption the format does not support.
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