Five ExifTool Commands That Tell You Everything About a Photo

Our remover tool strips metadata from a photo in seconds, but sometimes you want to look before you strip. What is actually in the file? Where did it come from? Has it been edited, re-saved, passed through an app? The tool for that is ExifTool, free by Phil Harvey, and it has been the standard for two decades. The catch is that its full manual runs to hundreds of pages. In practice, five commands cover almost everything an ordinary person needs.

1. The everything look: exiftool photo.jpg

Run exiftool IMG_4821.jpg with no options and you get the full tag dump: make and model, lens, exposure, ISO, the date and time, GPS coordinates, software, and a long tail of maker notes. The trap is that the interesting tags sit in a wall of 120 lines. Two of them matter more than the rest. GPS Position is the location, precise to about a metre on a phone photo. Serial Number (under the maker notes on most cameras, and as an internal identifier on iPhones) uniquely names the device that took the shot. We wrote about how that identifier follows your photos around in our piece on camera serials and unique image IDs.

2. The focused look: -gps:all, -serialnumber and friends

To pull only what you care about, name the tag groups: exiftool -gps:all -serialnumber -datetimeoriginal -software photo.jpg. This prints the location block, the device serial, the true capture time and any editing software in four lines. Useful corollary: -ModifyDate versus -DateTimeOriginal. If the original date says March and the modify date says Tuesday, the file was touched by something since the shot was taken, usually an editor or a messaging app. On their own these tags prove nothing, but a mismatch is a prompt to ask more questions.

3. The extraction check: -a -G1 -s

Photos passed through apps collect duplicate and contradictory tags: one GPS block in EXIF, another in XMP, a third in an embedded thumbnail that was never updated. The default output hides some of these. exiftool -a -G1 -s photo.jpg shows all tags, grouped by family and in short form, including duplicates. This is the command to use when a stripped-looking photo still seems to leak information, because the leak is usually in a second copy of the tag you already checked. This is the same class of surprise as the leftover data in screenshots we covered in what screenshots really contain: the obvious place is clean, the copy nobody looks at is not.

4. The provenance check: -jumbf:all

Newer phones and all the big AI tools embed C2PA Content Credentials, a signed manifest recording how the image was made and what has happened to it since. ExifTool reads it: exiftool -jumbf:all photo.jpg. If the file was generated by an AI tool, the manifest usually says so plainly. If it was captured on a recent iPhone or Pixel, the manifest carries the capture claim and any edit actions. The manifest is only trustworthy while it is intact; a re-save through an app that does not understand C2PA silently drops it, so an absent manifest is not proof of anything, but a present one is strong evidence. More background in our guide to C2PA Content Credentials.

5. The clean copy: -all=

exiftool -all= photo.jpg writes a new copy with every metadata tag removed. Two cautions. First, it does not touch the pixels: anything visible in the image itself, a street sign, a clock, a reflection, is still there, which is why stripping is only half of photo privacy. Second, add -overwrite_original only if you are sure, because by default ExifTool keeps the original as photo.jpg_original, and people have uploaded that file by mistake.

Reading the result honestly

Metadata tells you what a file claims, not what is true. Dates can be set by a camera with a wrong clock. Software tags survive operations that did nothing meaningful. A missing GPS tag means the location was stripped or never recorded, not that the photo is anonymous, since the pixels often carry enough context to place it. Use these commands to ask better questions, and when the goal is simply to share a photo safely, strip first with our free remover and read it second if you are curious.