How to View EXIF Data on Windows and Mac
· 4 min read
Short answer
To view EXIF data on Windows, right-click the photo, choose Properties and open the Details tab, then scroll to the GPS rows. On macOS, open the image in Preview and press Command-I, then select the Exif and GPS tabs. Neither route needs a download.
Both desktop operating systems have shipped a metadata viewer for years, and neither advertises it. What they show is a curated subset — enough for almost everything, and quietly incomplete in ways worth knowing about.
How do you see photo metadata on Windows?
Right-click the file and choose Properties, then the Details tab. Camera, exposure and dimensions appear near the top, GPS latitude and longitude at the very bottom of a long scrolling list.
- Step 1Right-click → PropertiesWorks from File Explorer or the desktop. Selecting several files first shows what they have in common.
- Step 2Open the Details tabThe default General tab shows file information only, not photo metadata. Details is the one you want.
- Step 3Scroll to GPSLatitude and longitude sit below the camera section and are easy to miss because the list is long.
- Step 4Strip fields from here tooThe Remove Properties and Personal Information link at the bottom edits or copies the file without the selected tags.
Windows displays coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds. To use them in a mapping service you need decimal degrees — the conversion is here.
How do you see photo metadata on macOS?
Open the image in Preview, press ⌘I, and use the tabs in the Inspector. General covers the file, Exif covers the camera and exposure, and GPS shows coordinates with a small map when present.
Preview shows decimal degrees directly, which makes it the faster of the two for anything involving coordinates. The Photos app displays a subset in its own info panel, but Preview exposes more of the raw tags.
When do you need a dedicated tool?
When you need tags the operating system hides: body serial numbers, lens serial numbers, maker notes, editing history and thumbnail data. The reference tool is exiftool, a free command-line utility available on both platforms.
Which viewer to use, and when the built-in one stops being enough, is worth a look. A single command prints everything: exiftool photo.jpg. Narrow it with exiftool -gps:all photo.jpg for location alone. The output is often several times longer than what Properties or the Inspector displays.
The hidden fields matter most for provenance work. A camera body serial number can link photographs published years apart under different names — the point made in the EXIF guide, and one that neither built-in viewer will show you.
Why does a downloaded photo show nothing?
Because it was stripped before you got it. Most publishing platforms re-encode images on upload and discard EXIF in the process, so anything saved from a social feed arrives with no camera details and no coordinates.
This is normal rather than a fault in the viewer. Which routes preserve metadata and which destroy it is covered in the platform comparison.
Can you read metadata for a whole folder at once?
Yes, and it is far faster than opening files one by one. Windows File Explorer can add Date Taken and Camera as sortable columns — though not GPS — and a single exiftool command will print any tags you choose for every image in a directory.
On Windows, switch to Details view, right-click the column header and choose More…. Date Taken and Camera Model are in that list; GPS latitude and longitude are not, and appear only in the per-file Properties dialog. Sorting a holiday folder by Date Taken still repairs the ordering of photos from several cameras in one step.
On either platform, exiftool -csv -gpslatitude -gpslongitude -datetimeoriginal *.jpg > out.csv produces a spreadsheet of an entire folder in about 1 second per 100 images — the fastest way to find which photos in an archive are geotagged.
Frequently asked questions
- Can Windows show a photo’s location on a map?
- The Windows 11 Photos app does: open the image, then the ••• menu and File info, where the Location section renders a map. File Explorer’s Properties dialog lists the coordinates as text only. macOS Preview shows a map in its GPS tab.
- Does Windows Photos app show EXIF?
- It shows a small subset in the info pane. The Properties dialog in File Explorer is more complete, and exiftool is more complete still.
- Is exiftool safe to install?
- It is a long-established open-source utility, widely used in photography and digital forensics. It reads and writes metadata locally and does not upload anything.
- Can I view EXIF without opening the file?
- Yes on Windows — the Details pane in File Explorer shows key fields for whatever is selected, so you can scan a folder without opening anything.
Sources
- Exif 3.0 (CIPA DC-008-2023) — Camera & Imaging Products AssociationThe tag set both operating systems read from.
- ExifTool by Phil Harvey — exiftool.orgThe reference metadata tool referred to throughout.
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