See a file's metadata
Read the tags travelling inside a file, including any location.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
What is usually in there
Photos and videos carry a surprising amount alongside the picture: the camera and lens, exposure settings, the date and time to the second, the software that last saved the file, and often the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. Phones record location by default unless you have turned it off.
Why it matters before you post
Most large platforms strip metadata on upload, but plenty of places do not: a file emailed as an attachment, put in a shared drive, or posted to a forum usually arrives intact. If a photo was taken at home, the coordinates of your home may be travelling with it. Check here first, and use remove metadata if you would rather it did not.
This reads the file on your own machine, which matters more than usual for a tool whose whole job is surfacing sensitive information. Checking a photograph for hidden location data by uploading it to a website is self-defeating: you have handed over the exact thing you were trying to control, along with your IP address, in order to be told it existed.
What is actually in there
- GPS coordinates, often to within a few metres, plus altitude and sometimes compass direction. This is the one that matters.
- Date and time to the second, which is a record of when you were somewhere, and occasionally contradicts what a file was presented as.
- Camera make, model and serial number. The serial is stable across every photograph a camera has ever taken, which links otherwise unconnected images to one device.
- Lens, exposure, ISO and focal length, which are harmless and genuinely useful if you are learning photography.
- Software, naming what last edited the file, which quietly reveals whether an image was processed.
- Owner and copyright fields, which some cameras let you set and which then carry your real name on every frame.
- Thumbnails. Older editors sometimes left the original thumbnail embedded after a crop, so the uncropped version travelled inside the file.
Where it survives and where it does not
Large platforms generally strip metadata on upload, and people take that as a rule. It is not one. A file emailed as an attachment, dropped in a shared folder, sent over most chat apps as a document rather than a photo, uploaded to a forum, or handed over on a USB stick usually arrives entirely intact. Selling something online with photographs taken at home is the case that catches people most often.
Video carries less than photographs but not nothing: creation dates, device information, encoder strings, and on phone footage a rotation flag and sometimes location.
Reading it before you strip it
It is worth looking rather than stripping blindly, because some of it you may want to keep. Photographers usually want exposure data preserved and location gone; anyone submitting evidence or documentation may need the timestamp intact. Remove metadata takes it all out, so check here first, decide, then strip and check again to confirm.
Common questions
It shows no metadata at all.
Some files genuinely have none, either because the software that made it wrote none or because a platform already stripped it.
Why is one of the tags a hex number?
FFmpeg prints the raw tag ID when it has no name for it in its table. The value next to it is still the real one; lens model is a common example.
Does it show GPS coordinates?
If the file contains them, yes, as latitude and longitude.
Is anything sent anywhere?
No. The file is read in your browser, which is the point.