When you take a picture with your digital camera, it records more than just the picture you saw. Digital cameras store extra information with each snap of the shutter. Sometimes the information is simply the camera model, original size, aperture and shutter settings, and additional image related data. As I will soon show you, sometimes, the picture holds much, much more..

Pictures are an important medium on the internet. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. With an exif information viewer, pictures are worth even more.

Exif stands for EXchangeable Image File format and is the file format used for most digital cameras. It is can record all of the details about your snapshot including:

Technical data (shutter speed, aperture settings, lighting, scene format, etc.)
GeoLocation – yes, some cameras can record the coordinates of where and when you took your picture
Original thumbnail – this is the good part, what the original picture looked like

Take for instance, this picture. If you view it, you’ll see it is a picture of a VPX battery package. If you had an exif viewer, you could see the uncropped image as the exif thumbnail. The image version online only shows the cropped version, but the exif thumbnail shows the original photo. While this is a fairly boring example, using an exif viewer, you can see if an image has been manipulated, cropped etc…

I use the exif viewer for Firefox, a free download. After installing it, just right-click any jpg on the internet and click View Exif information on the resulting menu. You’ll often find copyright information, if it’s a news outlet, and sometimes even contact information for the photographer. Sometimes, the original thumbnail is even visible, so you can see what the image originally contained.

Fortunately, Photoshop, irfanview and some other image editors will allow you to strip out the exif data if you configure their options. Please note for professional photographers, this will strip your copyright data too, so be sure to watermark it prior.