How to View Photo Metadata on iPhone without Third Party App

Updated Nov 29,2018 | by Cody

All photos taken by modern digital devices, by default, contain metadata including location (if enabled by the camera), date, device, software versions, file size, file name, etc. however, all these information is not normally visible on your iPhone. in this article, I will show you 2 ways to view photo Metadata on iPhone.

Metadata is a form of structuring data. As for images, it is called Exchangeable Image File Format (Exif). In order to protect your identity and privacy, it is recommended to remove metadata before posting photos online.

View and Remove Metadata on iPhone with Siri Shortcuts

As you know photo metadata is not normally available to view on your iPhone or iPad, but there are a few workarounds here. The first option would be using Siri Shortcuts. Shortcuts is the updated version of Workflow, the best automation tool on iOS.

The new Shortcuts app has many actions that you can use to create shortcuts to automate complex tasks. To view photo metadata is just one out of a million things that Shortcuts can do.

If you are not familiar with how Shortcuts works, then you can just use this shortcut Image Metadata that I just made to view or delete metadata from any image on your iPhone. Let me show you how it works.

Step 1. Download the Shortcuts app from AppStore and then I get the Image Metadata shortcut. You need to open the link in Safari.

Step 2. Open the Shortcuts app and run this shortcut.

Step 3. This shortcut will bring out all your photos and ask you to select one to view metadata.

Step 4. If you only want to view one photo’s metadata, then you can just tap Cancel to exit this shortcut. If you want to delete the metadata of this photo or you want to check another, tap OK to continue.

If you choose to delete photo metadata, this shortcut will resave the select photo without metadata and delete the original photo. During the process, the shortcut will ask for your confirmation to delete the select photo. Don’t worry, an exact same photo without metadata is saved.

This Shortcut is also available in Share Sheet, so you can select a photo from the Photos app and check the metadata from Share Sheet.

View Photo Metadata with Photo Investigator App

Another way to view photo metadata on iPhone is to use a free app from AppStore, Photo Investigator. Once you authorize the app to access all your photos, you will see a list of all your albums. Then you can select a photo from an album to view its metadata.

All the metadata are categorized. You can tap the green icons to see each category of metadata including general information, location of the photo was taken on a map, photo’s timestamp, camera settings, and photo’s caption.

You can also select Metadata > View All at the bottom to see all the metadata information.

If you only want to view the metadata, this app is quite convenient. If you need to edit or remove image metadata on your iPhone, you need to upgrade to its paid version, which is $2.99.

Transfer Photos to PC for Better Metadata Management

As you know, it is very convenient to view all metadata on a computer. To view Exif metadata on a PC, you can simply right click on the image and select Properties > Details.

Windows File Explorer also makes it easy to get rid of EXIF metadata of one or more images. You can select all the photos that you want remove metadata and right-click to select Properties > Details > Remove Properties and Personal Information.

That’s it. All you need to prepare is to transfer all photos from iPhone to PC. In order to make this process simple and smooth, you can use iPhone transfer software IOTransfer to one-click transfer all your photos to PC.

You can free download it to get started. At the program startup, it will scan all your data and allows you to transfer all photos to your computer in one click.

If you just want to pick a few photos to transfer, just go to the Manage > Photos to select one or more photos to export to your computer. Of course, you can also transfer the metadata-clean photos to iPhone by clicking the Import option.

Besides that, IOTransfer can also help you download videos from YouTube, Convert Video to another format, clean iPhone cache and junk files, etc. 

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