Free photo tools/View and remove photo metadata

What is EXIF data in a photo?

EXIF data is the information that a camera writes into a photo file at the moment it takes the picture: the date and the time, the camera and its settings, and, on a phone, often the place. It sits in the file next to the picture, and every person who gets the file can read it.

By Paul Bădărău, maker of Milkglass. Written on 7 October 2026.

What EXIF stands for

EXIF is short for Exchangeable image file format. It is a standard from the Japanese electronics and camera industry, first released in 1995, and today almost every camera and phone follows it. The standard defines a list of numbered fields, called tags, and a place in the file where they go. A camera fills in the tags that it knows, and an app that opens the photo can read them.

What EXIF data holds

A photo from a phone commonly holds these groups of fields:

• Date and time. When the photo was taken, down to the second, and when the file was last changed.
• Camera. The make and the model, such as the name of your phone, the lens, and sometimes the serial numbers of the camera body and the lens.
• Settings. The exposure time, the aperture, the ISO value, the focal length, and whether the flash fired.
• Software. The app or the system version that wrote the file.
• Location. The GPS part: latitude, longitude, and often altitude.
• Orientation. One number that says which way up the picture is to be shown.
• A preview. A small second copy of the picture, for file browsers.
• Maker data. A block in the camera maker's own format.
• Author and copyright. Free text, when the owner of the camera set it.

Which of them your photo holds depends on the camera and on its settings. The location is there only when the camera was allowed to use the location. Apple describes this for the iPhone in its guide Manage location metadata in Photos.

EXIF, IPTC, and XMP: three kinds of metadata

People say "EXIF" for all the hidden data in a photo. A file can in fact hold three kinds, and they overlap.

• EXIF comes from the camera, at the moment of the shot.
• IPTC comes from news photography. It holds a caption, keywords, the name of the photographer, and place names as words: city, region, country.
• XMP is a block of text that editing apps write. It can repeat fields of the other two, the location among them, and it can describe the edits.

This matters when you remove something. A place can sit in the GPS part of EXIF, as a city name in IPTC, and again in XMP. To take a place out of a file, clear it in each of them.

Who can read it

Everyone who has the file. Reading EXIF takes no special skill. On an iPhone, open a photo in Photos and swipe up, or tap the Info button, and you see the date, the device, the lens, and a map. On a computer, the file information window shows much of the same.

What the receiver gets depends on how the photo travels. A photo sent as a file, for example as an email attachment or through a file transfer, arrives as the file it was. Some apps and websites make their own smaller copy of a photo and write that copy without the original metadata. You cannot see from the outside which of the two happens, so the reliable way is to clean the copy before you send it.

When EXIF data is useful

In your own library, almost always. The date sorts your photos. The place puts them on a map and lets you search for a trip. The orientation shows them upright. A photographer reads the settings to learn why one picture came out sharp and the next one did not. There is no reason to strip the photos you keep.

When to remove it

Before a photo leaves your hands and goes to people you do not know well:

• A photo of a thing you sell, taken at home.
• A picture for a forum, a review, or a public profile.
• A photo of your children that goes to a large group.
• A document photo that you send to a company, where the date and the phone model are none of its business.

How to see and remove EXIF data

1. Open the photo metadata tool and choose a photo. It can be a JPEG, PNG, WebP, or HEIC file.
2. Read the list. The tool sorts what the file holds into location, date, camera, software, and other data, and it reads IPTC, XMP, and content credentials as well as EXIF.
3. Select Remove all metadata and download the clean copy.

The tool keeps two things: the orientation and the color profile. The picture needs them to look the same, and neither says where or when the photo was taken. The picture data itself stays byte for byte, so the clean copy has the same quality as the original. If you want to take out the place and keep the date and the camera, use Remove the location from a photo.