What’s stored in an image besides the picture
An image file can hold more than its pixels. Most of the rest is metadata in a handful of standard formats, and every field row names where its value came from.
Exif records camera and exposure settings, dates and times, and GPS position when the device adds it, and it can hold a small thumbnail image in a second directory. XMP is Adobe’s XML-based metadata format: editing software uses it for document history, and IPTC fields are stored in it. IPTC-IIM is an older binary format for captions, credits and copyright notices. An ICC profile describes the color space the pixel values are meant to be shown in. PNG stores text and Exif in their own chunks, WebP in its own chunks, and HEIF and AVIF in items inside the file’s box structure.
The tables sort fields by subject rather than by format, from camera, lens and exposure through location, dates, and author and rights to color, so a value stored in both Exif and XMP can appear twice in the same table, once for each source. Anything without a subject of its own lands in Other, and the raw XMP and a block-by-block map of the file wait in closed sections under the tables.
The fields worth checking before you share a photo
Start with location. Apple says that when Location Services is on for the Camera app, “these coordinates are embedded into each photo and video”. Then look at the device and the people behind it: Exif has standard fields for the camera body’s serial number, the lens serial number and the camera owner’s name.
Two more don’t show in the picture at all. The Exif thumbnail is a second, smaller image stored inside the same file, and some local AI image tools save their generation settings as text in the PNG file.
The strip above the tables counts the flagged fields by kind, and “Show only these fields” hides the rest. It flags location, serial numbers, owner and creator names and document IDs, along with thumbnails and generator settings, but it doesn’t check free-text fields such as descriptions and comments for personal details, so read those yourself. If anything there shouldn’t travel with the photo, remove it before you share.
AI and Content Credentials, read first
The card at the top of the results is the same reading the AI image checker gives, placed before the tables so that what the file declares about AI comes first. Its headline reports what the file declares, or what this page couldn’t read, such as This file declares it was made with AI. When nothing turns up, it says No AI signal found. That doesn’t mean the image is real. The checker page explains what each result means.
Why a photo can show almost no metadata
Editing, converting or sharing a file can remove its metadata. In IPTC’s 2019 test, images saved from Twitter had their metadata stripped and images saved from Facebook had no XMP, while Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive passed the original file through.
An image drawn onto a browser canvas and saved again is a newly encoded file, so the original’s metadata isn’t carried over. When the tables come back nearly empty, then, the file in front of you may be a copy made along the way rather than the one the camera or editing software saved, and the original, if you can get it, is the one to drop in.
Metadata is a claim, not proof
Exif’s original date and time field records when the device says the image was taken, so read it as the device’s account of the moment. Exif, XMP and IPTC fields carry no signature, so the tables can only show what they say. Treat every row as a statement the file makes about itself.
Content Credentials do carry a signature, and this page doesn’t check it. That is why the certificate’s subject appears as the “Named signer”, next to the words “signature not checked”. Other rows read from the credentials, such as the time they record and the software that wrote them, say “not checked” in their labels too.
Reading the camera numbers
Aperture, exposure time, ISO sensitivity, focal length and the 35 mm equivalent focal length each have a separate Exif field: FNumber, ExposureTime, PhotographicSensitivity, FocalLength and FocalLengthIn35mmFilm. The viewer writes them as values such as f/2.8 and 1/250 s. The first three sit in the Exposure table, and the two focal lengths sit in the Lens table beside the lens serial number.
The picture’s width and height in pixels are in the “This file” table, above the field tables, next to its format and exact size in bytes. To compare its shape with another image, reduce the dimensions to a ratio.
Why nothing is uploaded
This page’s script reads the file in the browser tab and never sends it anywhere, and it makes no network request; the tool keeps working with the network off once the page has loaded. It reads JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, HEIC, AVIF and TIFF files, and the two copy buttons under the results put the full report on your clipboard, as JSON or as plain text.
