Free tool · Fully offline
EXIF Data Viewer
Drop in a photograph and read everything inside it — the camera, its serial number, when it was taken, what edited it, and where it was standing. When there is no metadata at all, the file itself still tells you a great deal.
What is worth looking at first
GPS. If it survived, it is the whole ballgame. A photograph posted publicly with coordinates intact places a person at a spot on a date. Most social platforms strip it on upload, which is why the version that matters is usually the one sent by text or email, or pulled off a device directly.
Serial number. Body serial and lens serial are recorded by most interchangeable-lens cameras. Two photographs from different sources carrying the same body serial came from the same physical camera. That is one of the few genuinely hard links available in image analysis.
Date taken versus file changed. Date taken comes from the camera clock. File changed is written by whatever touched the file afterwards. When they disagree by months, something happened in between. When a camera clock is wrong, everything derived from it is wrong too — check the GPS timestamp, which comes from satellite and is independent of the camera clock.
Software. If it says Photoshop, Lightroom or a phone editor, you are not looking at an original. That does not prove manipulation, but it means the file is a derivative and you should ask for the original.
When there is no metadata
An empty result is itself information. Facebook, Instagram, X, and most messaging apps strip metadata on upload. A screenshot has almost none. A file that has been through Photoshop’s save-for-web has been deliberately cleaned.
So “no EXIF” usually means the image passed through a platform, not that somebody covered their tracks.
Either way the analysis carries on. Metadata can be stripped in a second; the structure of the file cannot. This page also reports:
- What the file actually is — read from its first bytes, not its name. A PNG renamed to .jpg is flagged.
- How it was saved — estimated JPEG quality, colour subsampling, baseline or progressive, bit depth, and how many quantisation tables it carries.
- Who wrote it — an Adobe marker, a Photoshop resource block, an ICC profile or a bare JFIF header each point at a different pipeline.
- Its internal structure — every block in the file with its size.
- The embedded thumbnail — shown next to the main image. Cameras write a preview when the shutter fires and some editors never update it. If the thumbnail shows a wider frame, a different crop, or something that is no longer in the picture, you are looking at the image before it was edited.
- Pixel analysis — brightness, contrast, clipping, dominant colours and a brightness histogram.
- Error level analysis — re-saves the image and maps what changed. Regions added or pasted after the original compression often stand out.
- SHA-1 and SHA-256 for the file as received.
A low quality estimate means the file has been through compression more than once. A progressive JPEG almost never comes straight from a camera. Dimensions of exactly 1080×1080 mean it went through Instagram. None of these is proof on its own; together they tell you where a file has been.
A note on handling
Work from a copy, never the original, and record the file’s hash before you touch it. If a photograph might end up in front of a court, how you handled it matters as much as what you found in it. The image comparison tool will generate a hash for you.