Image Metadata Viewer — EXIF & GPS

A photograph taken on a phone with location services on carries the coordinates of the place it was taken, accurate to a few metres, inside the file itself. Image Metadata Viewer reads that block and shows you what is in it — the camera and lens, the shutter, aperture and ISO, the moment the shutter fired, and the latitude and longitude if they are there.

The reading happens in the page. Your photo is opened as bytes by JavaScript already running in this tab and is never sent anywhere, which matters more here than for most tools: uploading a picture to find out whether it discloses your home address hands your home address to a stranger on the way.

A Real Example: The File This Parser Was Tested On

The EXIF reader here is written out rather than imported, so it was checked against a JPEG assembled byte by byte with known values in it. That file reports Northwind Optics / NW-A7 III for camera and model, 1/200 s at f/2.8, ISO 400, a 50 mm focal length, a capture time of 2026-03-14 at 09:41:22, and coordinates of 51.507222, -0.127500. Two details in that list are worth pointing at. Shutter speeds are stored as a fraction and printed the way a camera shows them, so 1/200 arrives as a ratio of 1 to 200 rather than as 0.005. Coordinates are stored as three separate degree, minute and second values plus a compass letter, so theW is what turns 0° 7' 39" into a negative longitude — both forms are shown, because a mapping tool wants the decimal and a caption wants the degrees.

Supported Formats and Where EXIF Actually Lives

• JPEG keeps EXIF in an APP1 segment near the front of the file. The segment is walked marker by marker until the image data starts, so a file with several application segments is handled the same as one with a single segment.
• PNG gained an eXIf chunk in the 2017 spec revision, and it holds the identical payload. One reader covers both containers, because the payload in each case is an ordinary TIFF file.
• Any image the browser can open reports its file facts and pixel dimensions, whether or not it carries EXIF, so WebP, GIF and BMP still give you the size and megapixel count.
• Anything that is not an image stops at “That file is not an image.” The ceiling is 50 MB, which is well past a full-frame RAW export.

What Happens When There Is No EXIF

Most of the time, nothing is wrong. Screenshots never carry EXIF, exports from many editors drop it, and the large social networks strip it on upload, so a picture saved from one of them arrives clean and this tool says so plainly instead of showing an empty table. When coordinatesare present they are pulled out of the tables and put in a red banner above everything else, because that is the one finding people open this kind of tool to check for. Two guards keep a malformed file from becoming a hang rather than a message: a directory claiming more than 512 entries and a tag claiming more than 4,096 values are both treated as corrupt and skipped. Reading is all this tool does — removing metadata is a different job, and is tracked separately.