PhotoToJpgConvert a photo

What a photo's EXIF block contains

EXIF is a small table of facts that a camera writes into the photo: when, with what, how, and often where. Most of it is useful. Some of it — the location above all — is worth knowing about before a photo is shared.

Tag by tag

Capture

Date taken (DateTimeOriginal)
When the shutter fired, in the camera's local time. The one most photo libraries sort by.
Time zone (OffsetTimeOriginal)
Newer phones add it; without it, “10:22” could be any of 24 times.
Exposure time, F-number, ISO
How the picture was made. Harmless, and useful to photographers.
Orientation
How to turn the stored pixels to display them upright — values 1 to 8.

Camera

Make, Model
“Apple iPhone 15 Pro”. Identifies the device type, not the device.
Lens model, focal length
Which of a phone's cameras was used, and the zoom.
Body and lens serial numbers
Some cameras write them. These do identify one particular camera.

Location

Latitude, longitude
To a few metres when location services were on.
Altitude, direction, GPS time
Height above sea level, which way the camera faced, and a satellite timestamp.

Software and rights

Software
The phone's OS version or the editor that last saved the file.
Artist, Copyright, Owner name
Set by some cameras and editors; may contain a real name.

Other

Thumbnail
A small JPEG copy of the photo. It is not updated by every editor, so it can show the picture before a crop.
Maker note
A block in the manufacturer's own format. Unreadable to most tools; may hold more settings and identifiers.

Which viewers read what

Photo libraries (on phones, Windows Photos, macOS Photos) read the date, the orientation and the location, and use them to sort, turn and map pictures. Websites mostly read nothing — and many social networks strip EXIF on upload — but a file sent as a document, by email or through a cloud drive keeps every tag. Upload portals for forms rarely care about EXIF at all, apart from the resolution tags they sometimes check as DPI.

Why orientation is written as 1

A phone held upright still records the picture sideways, as the sensor sees it, and writes Orientation = 6: “turn me 90° to display”. Every decoder here turns the pixels upright as they are read. If the converted JPG kept the tag at 6, a viewer would turn the already-upright picture again and show it on its side. So the tag is written as 1 — “as stored” — on every re-encoded file. When a JPEG is rewritten losslessly (pixels untouched), its original orientation is kept, because those pixels were never turned.

Seeing it and removing it

The photo metadata viewer lists every tag a photo carries, prints coordinates as plain numbers, and saves copies without the location or without any metadata — losslessly for JPEGs. Each saved file is read again to prove what it carries.

Questions

Does every photo have EXIF?
Photos straight from a phone or camera almost always do. Screenshots, pictures saved from web pages and files that went through a messaging app often have none — many apps strip it on the way.
Can EXIF reveal where I live?
If location was on when the photo was taken, the GPS tags hold coordinates accurate to a few metres. A photo taken at home and shared with its EXIF intact carries your address in all but name.
Why does a photo turn sideways after some edits?
Phones save pixels in the sensor's orientation and add a tag saying how to turn them. A program that turns the pixels but keeps the old tag makes viewers turn them again. This converter turns the pixels and writes the tag as 1, “already upright”.
Is EXIF the only metadata?
No. XMP (often from editing software), IPTC (captions and rights, used by newsrooms) and the colour profile can also be present. Removing all metadata here drops EXIF, XMP, IPTC and comments; the colour profile stays because it changes how the colours display.

Photos stay on your device.