exif

What is EXIF Data in Digital Photos?

In the digital age, there’s a lot more to a photograph than the image itself. When most digital cameras capture an image, they record certain parameters and write them in the image’s file for later use. These parameters are called metadata and are stored as Exchangeable Image File data, or EXIF for short.

The Cameras That Shot the Winning Photos of World Press Photo 2019

World Press Photo just announced the winning photos for the 2019 edition of it's world's most prestigious photojournalism contest. Camera metadata shared alongside the top photos is again providing us with an inside look at what gear the world's top photojournalists are using at the moment.

How Lightroom Can Tell You What Lens You Should Buy

Lightroom has a feature that can help you use your photography metadata to make informed lens buying and upgrade decisions. In my personal case, Lightroom proved to me that I don't need a 24-70mm lens. I'll show you how.

This Website Reveals How JPEG Photos Were Edited in Lightroom

As photographers, we’re always interested in how other people edit their photos to achieve a certain look. Pixel Peeper is a new website that can take a JPEG and tell you exactly how it was edited in Lightroom, along with the camera model, lens, and settings -- as long as that info is found in the file's EXIF data.

Adobe Discards Valuable Metadata When Processing RAW Files

Cameras record a ton of information about the exposure settings of your camera, and these have been standardized into EXIF metadata fields. What few people realize is that metadata is not limited to these standard fields, and your camera is recording far more information than you ever thought possible.

Here’s How Camera Brands Have Fared on Flickr Over the Past 5 Years

Flickr recently gathered up photo and camera data to review the past year, and now the company is doing some number crunching to reveal major trends in the cameras used by the photographer community.

The graph above shows how the popularity of major camera brands have changed over the past half decade.

The White House is Shooting with a Sony a7R II Now

Guess who's shooting with a Sony a7r II camera now? Chief Official White House photographer Pete Souza.

The latest photo posted to the official White House Flickr photostream shows that Souza used the highly-regarded Sony mirrorless camera to photograph President Obama talking to Cuba President Raúl Castro in the Oval Office in mid-September.

My Metadata Fail, or: Why You Should Always Check the Copyright Info on Loaner Gear

The life of a freelancer can be very unpredictable. I find it to be epitome of “feast or famine.” It’s good to have some down time on equipment every now and again to get things serviced, and I took this latest opportunity to get my D700 serviced by Nikon.

One of the perks of a NPS (Nikon Professional Services) membership is loaner equipment. My Nikon D700 went in, and they sent me a D750 on consignment. No sooner did that D750 arrive than I had a barrage of phone calls for assignments. I barely had time to get acquainted with the new body before we were off to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to photograph Coach Bret Bielema of the Arkansas Razorback for the Wall Street Journal.

Practical Pointers for Getting Your Photos Noticed on Flickr and 500px

You have just composed your photographic masterpiece. After hours of planning, precise composition, and utilizing your technical knowledge, you have captured the perfect image. It's now time to share it with the world, but hours after posting your pièce de résistance, you've only received a meager two views.

In this article, we'll be discussing some basic tips for helping you make your work shine and become more noticeable on photo sharing sites.

Photographer Recovers $15K in Stolen Gear Thanks to EXIF Copyright Info

If your camera lets you automatically add copyright EXIF metadata to every photo you take, you should do it: it could help you recover your gear if it ever gets stolen. That's exactly what happened to photographer Jon Grundy: after losing $15,000 in gear, Grundy was able to identify the thief and recover his stolen equipment after seeing his name in the copyright info of online photos.

10 Helpful Websites for Protecting Your Photography Copyrights

Being a photographer in the digital age presents a number of excellent advantages along with a collection of new concerns. Sharing your images with the world and gaining exposure has never been easier, but the risk that someone may decide to steal your work is also increasing. Protecting your images on the web should be at the forefront of your thought process when uploading a new potential masterpiece. To help you out, we have established a list of ten sites that can assist you in your creative endeavor.

PhotoExif Helps You Record EXIF Data for Film Photos On the Go

One of the advantages of digital photography is having information about how each photo was shot embedded within the photograph's file itself. This EXIF data is something photographers commonly jot down in notebooks as they walk around and shoot with their analog cameras.

Photographer Oriol Garcia wanted a better solution than manually writing down shot times and details. Since most people have smartphones now, why not make an extremely easy to use app that can document the info of every photograph taken? He ended up creating an app called PhotoExif that can do just that.

Study Looks Into Whether Photo Websites Play Nicely with Copyright Metadata

How well does your favorite photo hosting and/or sharing service handle the copyright information and EXIF data of your photographs? How do the popular services stack up against one another in this regard?

Metadata handling isn't often discussed when photo sites are compared, but that's what the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has been devoting an entire study to. The organization has published its findings regarding which companies play nicely with your metadata, and which pretend it's not there.

EXIF Data May Have Revealed Location of Fugitive Software Tycoon John McAfee

If you've been following the news, you might have heard that a man John McAfee is on the run from police who want to question him about a murder. Not just any ol' John McAfee, but the John McAfee, the once-ultra-rich founder of anti-virus software company McAfee. Well, a photograph published to the web today may have revealed the exact location McAfee is was hiding.

The Most Popular Cameras and Settings for Reuters’ 2012 Photos of the Year

Reuters has published its list of the best photographs taken in 2012, a massive collection of 95 powerful images showing different events that have occurred around the globe over the past year. In addition to large photos, descriptions by the photographers, and the official captions, each image is also accompanied by information about the equipment and settings that were used to capture it.

Flickr Now Displays Basic EXIF Info More Prominently on Photo Pages

Flickr has quietly rolled out a great incremental update to its photo-sharing service. Individual photo pages now display a number of EXIF details under a new section labeled "Additional Info", found in the column to the right. With a quick glance, you'll be able to see the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and focal length that a photographer was using when he or she snapped any photo.

How to Shift the EXIF Timestamps for a Large Batch of Photos

Here's a friendly public service announcement: remember to time on your camera before and after Daylight Savings Time (which just ended yesterday in the United States) -- unlike cell phones, digital cameras generally don't adjust their own time. If you accidentally forgot and now have a bunch of photos with timestamps that are off by an hour, there are some programs out there that can help you set things right.

Lettuce-Defiling Burger King Employee Located Using EXIF Data, Fired

This past Monday, someone posted a photo to imageboard 4chan showing a Burger King employee stomping on two tubs of lettuce. The caption read "This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King." Other tech-savvy vigilante users immediately pounced on the case in hopes of identifying the poster. Unfortunately for the lettuce defiler, the photograph was taken with geotagging enabled, allowing the EXIF data to be used to zero in on the precise restaurant where the image was created: 1475 Worton Boulevard, Mayfield Heights, OH.

An Unexpected ‘Kiss’ in Canon Rebel T4i EXIF Data

If you've noticed an unexpected "Kiss" in your Canon Rebel T4i EXIF data, there's no need to panic (or blush!).

In certain applications that show EXIF data, the camera name may show up as the EOS Kiss X6i -- the Japanese market name of the same camera model. Additionally the Camera Settings / Remote Shooting screens of EOS Utility (EU) also shows “EOS Kiss X6i," according to a Canon product advisory.

Hack Your Exif Data from the Command Line: Five Fun Uses for Exiftool

It happens every time you press the shutter. Tiny circuits spring into action and furiously record the information from every sensor pixel onto your memory card. But pixel information is not all that is recorded. With every shutter press, your camera records dozens of interesting details about how the photo was taken. These details are tucked away deep inside the labyrinth of code that comprises your photo file. Photo editing softwares, such as Photoshop or Lightroom, can unlock some of this data for viewing later. But they normally only scratch the surface of the available information by displaying only the most commonly used Exif tags.

To mine the deepest depths of your Exif data, you may want to try a utility called Exiftool. This utility is known for its ability to squeeze every last drop of information from your Exif data. Don’t expect a slick, graphical interface, though. Although there are more user friendly softwares which incorporate the Exiftool engine, we’re going to demonstrate Exiftool where it is at its minimalist best – at the command line.

Lightroom Plugin Offers and Easy Way to Add EXIF Data for Manual Lenses

Many photographers, especially those who used to shoot film, still enjoy the feedback and control offered by fully manual lenses. The only problem with using these lenses in the digital age is that modern camera bodies don't recognize them and therefore add no EXIF lens data to your images; adding that data up until now required you to install a command line tool such as ExifTool and learn complicated prompts. But now there's an easier way to make these changes happen inside of Lightroom.

New Campaign Seeks to Make Metadata Permanent

EXIF data embedded in an image file can shed quite a bit of information about a photo, including how it was created and the owner of the copyright. It's useful, but can be easily stripped away. A new consortium led by three organizations (IPTC, 4A's, and ANA) is pushing to make metadata permanent.

This Photo May Have Been Taken with the Upcoming iPhone 5

What you see here may be the first leaked photograph shot with the upcoming iPhone 5. The EXIF data claims it was shot with the iPhone 4, but other EXIF details indicate otherwise. Although the leaked image was cropped, the original size of the image was 3264x2448 (roughly 8MP), the rumored resolution found on the next iPhone. The lens info was recorded as "4.3mm f/2.4", more similar to a point-and-shoot than then 3.85mm f/2.8 lens found on the iPhone 4. Finally, the geotag info in the photo shows it was taken at 37.33216667,-122.03033333 -- the location of Apple's headquarters. Check out the full-res file with EXIF intact here.

Where’s the Big Privacy Brouhaha Over Serial Numbers in EXIF Data?

On August 4, 2006, AOL published a text file containing 20 million searches done by 650,000 users over a 3-month period for research purposes. Although the company anonymized the data by showing the users as numerical IDs, people soon realized that many people searched for personally identifiable information (e.g. their names), allowing real names to be put to unique IDs, thus revealing the search history of that individual. After the media caught wind of this, the whole thing was known as the AOL search data scandal.

Use a Field Notebook to Jot Down “EXIF Data” for Your Film Photos

One of the big advantages of digital photography is that EXIF data is embedded into your images, allowing you to easily learn when and how (and more recently where) a particular photograph was captured. If you still enjoy shooting film, then a solution is to jot down notes about your photography while you're shooting.