How to see a photo’s metadata without uploading it anywhere
Before you decide whether to strip a photo’s metadata, it helps to know what it carries. You can check on your phone or your computer, but each system shows only part of it, and almost every online viewer asks you to upload the photo to its server.
What you will find
A photo’s metadata falls into four kinds of information, and they do not all weigh the same:
- Where you were: the GPS coordinates, often with the altitude and the direction the phone was pointing.
- Who you are: the phone’s make and model, sometimes its serial number, the software it was edited with and, if someone filled it in, the author and copyright.
- When it happened: the exact date and time, with the time zone.
- Technical: exposure, lens or colour profile. It rarely says anything about you, and some of it, like the orientation, is needed to show the photo the right way up.
On iPhone and Android
On iPhone, open the photo in Photos and swipe up, or tap the info button. You will see the date, the model, the lens, the camera settings and a map of where it was taken.
On Android, in Google Photos, open the photo and swipe up, or open the three-dot menu and “Details”. It shows the date, the device, the size and the location.
Both show the essentials, but not everything: not the serial number, not the XMP blocks editors add, not the manufacturer’s notes.
On Windows and Mac
On Windows, right-click the photo, choose “Properties” and open the “Details” tab. The camera and the dates are there and, further down, the latitude and longitude.
On a Mac, open the photo in Preview and choose “Tools” → “Show Inspector”. The info tab has sections for EXIF and, if the photo has it, GPS.
That is more than the phone shows, but still only part: every viewer reads the fields it knows and stays quiet about the rest.
Online, without uploading the photo
Online metadata viewers are convenient, but most of them work the same way: you upload the photo to their server, they read it there and send you the result. To find out whether a photo says where you live, you are sending it to a stranger.
KillEXIF reads it in your browser. You drop the photo onto the page and the analysis happens on your device: the photo never leaves it. That is not a promise but a rule the browser enforces: the page declares connect-src 'none', which forbids it from making any connection. You can check it in the page’s source.
Each field is sorted — “Where you were”, “Who you are”, “When it happened”, “Technical” — with a bar that measures how much the file reveals. If the photo has coordinates, they are drawn on a map inside the page itself, without asking any map server. Only the “Open in OpenStreetMap” button leaves KillEXIF, and it warns you first.
Analysing is free and unlimited, and not only for photos: videos, audio, PDFs and Office documents too, fourteen formats in all.
And if you do not like what you see
On the same page, “Clean” removes the metadata without re-encoding the photo: the image stays identical, byte for byte, and the clean file is read back to check nothing is left. If you want to keep something, like the orientation or the copyright, you can choose it first.
The guide on GPS in phone photos has the step by step for removing just the location.