What is your photo secretly carrying?
Pick a photo and this page reads the hidden metadata inside it: often the GPS coordinates, the camera's serial number and the moment it was shot. The photo never leaves your browser.
Check a photo
How it works
What a photograph carries
A camera writes a block of data into the file alongside the picture. Most of it is uninteresting and some of it is not.
- Where. GPS latitude and longitude, often to a few metres, plus altitude and sometimes the direction the lens was pointing. A phone photograph taken indoors usually carries the address.
- When. The moment the shutter fired, in local time, and on newer files the offset, which gives the time zone and therefore roughly where in the world the camera was set.
- Which camera. Make, model, lens, and on many cameras the body serial number. That is the field that links a set of photographs to each other and to a device, regardless of who posted them or under what name.
- What was done to it. The software field names the editor, so an image claiming to be straight from a phone that carries an editor has been through one.
- Who, sometimes. An artist or copyright field filled in once in a camera's menu and forgotten, and on some platforms the names of people identified in the picture.
Where it survives, and where it does not
Most large social platforms strip metadata on upload, which is why "it was fine when I posted it" is common and misleading: the copy on the platform is clean and the copy you emailed, put in a shared folder, attached to a listing or sent over a messaging app that preserves originals is not.
The places it reliably survives are the ones people forget: email attachments, cloud folders shared by link, marketplace and rental listings that host images themselves, forums, and any "send as original quality" option.
Reading it, and then deciding
This page shows what is there and keeps the photograph in your browser. Seeing it is usually enough to make the decision obvious: a picture of a bicycle for sale does not need the coordinates of the garage it was taken in.
CLOAK removes it. Worth knowing that it strips the whole block rather than selected fields, because a partial removal that leaves the serial number is the kind of half-measure that reads as safe and is not, and that a screenshot of a photograph carries none of the original's metadata, which is crude but effective. What a photo says about where it was taken goes through the whole question.
Doing this often? The OBSCURA Sovereign Suite takes the location and camera details out of a whole folder of photos, documents and PDFs in one go. On its own, US$4 a month; with everything else, US$9 a month or US$79 a year. 7 days free.