View image metadata online

What the report shows, on six real runs

Six sample files, with no real person or place. The rows are what the tool listed.

Each inspection took 135 to 212 ms. The file stayed in the browser.

How to read each row

• GPS / location: coordinates stored in the EXIF block. This is the row to act on before you post. To see that spot on a map, with altitude, direction and capture time, use the photo location finder.
• EXIF / camera: camera model, lens, capture time, and the software that last saved the file.
• XMP and IPTC: creator, copyright, caption, keywords, and sometimes an AI source type. See XMP and IPTC.
• C2PA manifest: a signed Content Credentials record, shown with its size. What it means is on Content Credentials.
• AI provenance: an AI source type or generator text such as a prompt or workflow. ComfyUI files show up here, see ComfyUI.
• Text chunk / Other: PNG text and other chunks that are not a known category.

What it does not show

The report is a summary. It does not print every tag, it does not decode MakerNotes, and it cannot tell you whether the pixels contain a watermark. For a complete tag dump use ExifTool:

exiftool -a -G1 -s photo.jpg

That prints every tag with its group, which is what we use to double-check the tool’s own After lists. Windows and macOS also show a subset: Windows has the Details tab of File Properties, and Apple’s Preview user guide describes showing where a photo was taken from the GPS section of the Inspector. We have not run those two ourselves.

Cameras that record a shutter count in their photos keep it in MakerNotes. To read that number, use the camera shutter count checker, which runs ExifTool in the browser. Brand notes: Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Pentax and Ricoh, Canon.

Other online viewers and removers are compared on the exif.tools alternative, Metadata2Go alternative, and Pics.io metadata remover alternative.

Then what

1. If the report is empty or only shows things you are happy to share, send the file.
2. If it shows GPS or camera, clean with All metadata or EXIF / GPS: Remove EXIF.
3. If it shows a C2PA manifest or an AI marker, AI metadata remover and Remove C2PA explain the options.
4. Always read the After list. It is a second scan of the new file.

View image metadata here before you send the file. When the list shows a location or a camera, delete EXIF data and read the After list. The inspect list is the same read the cleaner uses, and the photo is not uploaded.

Questions

Does this upload my image?

No. The file is read and parsed in your browser. In our test of six files we recorded every network request the page made while inspecting. None went to another site (we had blocked the analytics script), so none carried the file.

Does it list every metadata tag?

No. It lists categories and the key value for each (the coordinates for GPS, the camera and software for EXIF, the size of an XMP or IPTC block, whether a C2PA manifest is present). For a full tag-by-tag dump, ExifTool prints everything: exiftool -a -G1 -s file.jpg. On our mixed JPEG, ExifTool listed 39 entries where the report lists six rows.

Does inspecting use up the free clean?

No. In our test we inspected each file first and then cleaned it on the free plan, and the clean worked every time. Inspect only never creates a download.

Can it show whether an image is AI generated?

It shows markers in the file: a C2PA manifest, an IPTC AI source type, or generator text such as a prompt. An image with none of those may still be AI generated; metadata can be missing or removed. For the AI-focused walkthrough see how to check a photo for AI metadata.

Which formats does it read?

JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF, TIFF, and BMP. This page reads still images. PDFs use the remove metadata from a PDF page. Word and Office files use the remove metadata from a Word document page. Video is not supported.

What do I do if the report shows GPS?

Clean the file with All metadata or EXIF / GPS mode, then read the After list. The remove EXIF page has a measured run.

For a grouped field table with a map, use the metadata viewer. Camera tags and GPS, including how to remove them, are on EXIF data. The wider field guide is photo metadata.