Photo GPS location viewer

Worked example: reading a photo's GPS tags

A phone photo taken on Liberty Island stores its position as three fractions per axis plus a hemisphere letter. The latitude tags read 40/1, 41/1, and 213/10 with the reference N. The longitude tags read 74/1, 2/1, and 402/10 with the reference W.

Degrees, minutes, and seconds convert to decimal degrees as degrees plus minutes divided by 60 plus seconds divided by 3,600. For the latitude that is 40 + 41 / 60 + 21.3 / 3,600 = 40.68925. For the longitude it is 74 + 2 / 60 + 40.2 / 3,600 = 74.04450, made negative because W means west of Greenwich. The pin lands at 40.689250, -74.044500, beside the Statue of Liberty.

The same photo might also carry an altitude of 935/10 with altitude reference 0 (above sea level), which reads as 93.5 m, and an image direction of 2705/10 with reference T, which means the camera faced 270.5° from true north, roughly west. A reference of 1 would put the altitude below sea level, and M would mean magnetic north.

How to use it

1. Drag photos onto Drop photos here or choose files, or click it to pick JPEG, HEIC, HEIF, or TIFF files. You can add more photos later; they join the same list.
2. Each photo with GPS tags gets a pin, and the map zooms to fit them. The Photos read panel counts photos with a location, with EXIF but no GPS, with no EXIF, and files that could not be read.
3. In the table, press Show to fly to a photo and color its pin orange, Copy to copy its coordinates, or Place to look up the nearest address.
4. Download every located photo with CSV, GeoJSON, or KML. Press Clear to empty the list.
5. To share a photo without its location, follow the steps under Before you share a photo, then drop the new copy here to check it.

What the tool reads from a photo

EXIF is a block of tags that cameras and phones write into a photo when they save it. The tool looks for the block, follows its pointer to the GPS section, and reads the latitude, longitude, altitude, and image direction tags. From the main section it reads the camera make and model, and from the Exif section it reads the original capture time and, when present, its UTC offset.

Only those fields are decoded. The picture itself is never decoded or shown, which is why the tool can read HEIC files from an iPhone even in browsers that cannot display HEIC. In a JPEG the block sits in an APP1 segment near the start of the file. In HEIC and HEIF it is stored as a separate Exif item that the file's index points to, and it is not compressed, so no image decoder is needed. TIFF files are read the same way.

Why a photo may show no location

The table gives a reason for every photo without a pin. "No GPS tags" means the camera saved EXIF but had location turned off or no satellite fix. "No EXIF block" usually means the file was edited, exported, or passed through a service that removes metadata. Many messaging apps and social networks re-encode photos and drop EXIF, so a photo saved from a chat often has no location even if the original did.

Phone photo pickers can do the same. Some remove location or convert HEIC to JPEG before a web page receives the file. If you expect a location and see none, copy the original file to your computer and drop that instead. A fix of exactly 0, 0 is treated as no location, since some cameras write zeros when they have no signal.

How accurate the position is

The coordinates are whatever the device recorded at the moment of capture. A phone outdoors with a clear sky is usually within a few meters. Indoors, in dense city streets, or right after the camera was switched on, the fix can be tens of meters or more off, and the phone may fall back to a Wi-Fi or cell estimate. The capture time has no time zone unless the device also wrote an offset, so the Taken column shows the camera's local clock.

Privacy: what stays on your device

Photos are opened with the browser's file reader and parsed by code on this page. No photo, thumbnail, or tag is sent anywhere. Two kinds of request do leave the page. The map loads its basemap tiles from OpenFreeMap, and because it zooms to fit your photos and to any photo you Show, those tile requests reveal the area you are looking at, down to a few streets after Show. Pressing Place for a row sends that one pair of coordinates to the Photon geocoder to look up a nearby address. Exports are built in the browser and saved straight to your device.

A photo that carries GPS tags reveals where it was taken to anyone who receives the original file. Before posting a photo of your home or your children, remove the location with the steps in the panel next to the map, then drop the new copy here to confirm it shows no location.