What is EXIF data, and what does a photo's metadata reveal?

EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) is written by the camera itself. The standard dates from the late 1990s and is maintained by the Japanese camera industry body CIPA; the current revision is Exif 3.0 from 2023. It records the capture date and time to the second, GPS coordinates if the camera had them, make, model and lens, exposure settings, the orientation flag, and a small embedded preview thumbnail.

IPTC fields come from the news-photo world and are written by editing and cataloguing software rather than cameras: caption, creator, credit line, copyright notice, keywords and place names. A photo that has never been through Photoshop, Lightroom or a similar tool usually has none.

XMP is an XML packet defined by Adobe and now used by phones and most editors. It stores edit history, ratings and lens corrections, and frequently a second copy of the capture date and location, which is why removing only the EXIF block is not always enough.

Two more blocks sit alongside these and are harmless: the ICC colour profile, which tells a screen how to render the colours, and the orientation flag, which tells a viewer how to rotate a photo that was stored sideways. A good cleaner keeps both.

The exposure fields (ISO, shutter speed, aperture, focal length) are not personal on their own, but together with the device model they make a photo easier to link to other photos from the same camera.

Anyone who has the file. No password or special software is needed. Windows shows it under Properties → Details; macOS under Preview → Tools → Show Inspector; the iPhone Photos app when you swipe up on a picture; Google Photos on Android in the same gesture. Command-line users read every field with exiftool. The checker on this site shows the categories a file contains without leaving your browser, and how to check a photo for location data walks through each platform step by step.

JPEG, HEIC and HEIF, TIFF, and every camera RAW format (DNG, CR3, NEF, ARW and the rest) carry EXIF. WebP can carry EXIF and XMP chunks. PNG gained an official eXIf chunk in 2017 and has always allowed free-text chunks, so a PNG can hold author, software and time fields even though it rarely holds GPS. GIF has no standard metadata block at all.

Screenshots deserve their own note: they are new images rendered by the operating system, so they never contain the location or camera data of whatever was on screen, though they can carry the time they were taken and the software that made them. Video files (MP4, MOV) keep their own metadata, including a location tag on iPhone recordings; the tools on this site are for still images only.

A JPEG is a sequence of segments. EXIF, XMP and IPTC each sit in their own segment ahead of the compressed image data. Removing them means writing the file again without those segments; the image data is copied as it is, so nothing is re-compressed and nothing is lost. PNG and WebP are built from chunks and work the same way. The only field worth writing back is the orientation flag, so a photo stored sideways still displays correctly.

Re-saving a photo from an editor is a different operation. It may drop some blocks, but it typically writes new ones (a Software tag, a fresh XMP packet with the edit) and re-compresses the pixels. Taking a screenshot of a photo removes everything but also degrades the image and keeps whatever was visible.

Drop a JPEG, PNG or WebP into the checker at the top of this page. It lists the categories found, and one tap produces a clean download. Nothing is uploaded. For HEIC photos, for a map of where a photo was taken, or for cleaning many photos at once, the iPhone and Android app does the same job on the device and can be called from any app's share sheet.