EXIF Viewer

What is EXIF?

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) – Metadata embedded in Images by Cameras: EXIF (short for “Exchangeable Image File Format”) is a block of metadata that many Cameras, Phones, etc. add to the images they shoot. It contains lots of information, like the timestamp of when it was taken, where, how, with which settings the picture was shot. (Lobisser, 2014)

What metadata is in your photo?

• Camera & lens: make, model, serial number, lens model
• Exposure settings: ISO value, aperture value, shutter speed, focal length, Flash settings.
• GPS: latitude, longitude, altitude, compass direction, timestamp
• Software: operating system, editing app, edit history
• IPTC: photographer name, copyright, caption, keywords
• AI provenance: C2PA content credentials, Stable Diffusion prompts, Midjourney job IDs

Why check EXIF before sharing photos online

This means that a seemingly innocuous photo of your living room could contain the exact latitude and longitude of your home in the EXIF data, while a studio shot of an object could contain your full name in the copyright field of the EXIF data. Your phone’s serial number can also be included in the EXIF data of photos taken with your phone, which means every image you post online could potentially be tracked back to you and that specific phone.

How to check if a photo is AI-generated

Look for four things:

1. A C2PA / Content Credentials manifest (Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft ship these).
2. A PNG parameters or workflow chunk (Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI).
3. A dc:creator or xmp:CreatorTool reference to Midjourney, DALL·E, Firefly or Ideogram.
4. The Software tag matching a known generator.

This tool will automatically detect all four of these. However, metadata can be stripped from an image, so the absence of these indicators doesn’t mean the photo isn’t AI-generated. You can use a tool like AI Image Detector to check. It won’t be 100% accurate, but I’ve tested it extensively on images generated by AI image generators like ChatGPT, and it flagged them.

Why some image URLs don’t work

CORS stands for Content Options Request Security and is enforced by browsers. It is up to the web site whether other pages on the web can fetch images stored on that web site. Some image hosting web sites like Imgur, Wikipedia (user-contributed images), GitHub (user-uploaded images), and Unsplash allow retrieval of images uploaded by users. Most social media sites (Twitter images, Instagram images, images posted to Reddit, Facebook images) block CORS on their Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to prevent the image from being downloaded by other pages or scripts.

EXIF vs IPTC vs XMP

• EXIF — camera-generated technical data (exposure, GPS, timestamps).
• IPTC — human-authored newsroom data (byline, caption, copyright).
• XMP (eXtensible Metadata Platform): a “container” managed by Adobe, that stores edit history, comments, etc. on images; it is also used to add “modern” fields, like those used to track AI generated images.

Which formats carry EXIF

• Full support: JPEG, HEIC/HEIF, TIFF, RAW (CR2/NEF/ARW/DNG…)
• Partial (via XMP chunk): PNG, WebP, AVIF
• None: GIF, BMP, SVG

How ConvertYard reads EXIF locally

The JavaScript library exifr is used to read the EXIF information of the local file. The file bytes are read using the browser’s FileReader API and then passed straight to the parser. No upload, no server round-trip, no third-party analytics on the file itself. You can verify this by checking the DevTools’ → Network panel.