How to View Photo Metadata on Android

Open the photo in Google Photos and swipe up, or tap the three dots, then Details. You get the date, the file size, the resolution and, if the photo has coordinates, a map.

That panel is a summary. We read a real Samsung Galaxy S24 photo field by field and counted 209. The gallery shows perhaps eight of them.

What does Android show you by default?

The steps vary by manufacturer, and the wording moves between versions. The pattern holds across them.

In Google Photos, open the picture and swipe up, or use the three-dot menu, then Details. In a Samsung Galaxy gallery, open the photo and tap the information icon. Other skins put it behind Details or Info in the same three-dot menu.

What you get is roughly the same everywhere: the capture date, the file name and size, the resolution, the camera settings in one line, and a map when coordinates exist.

That is a useful summary and it is not the file. How to view photo metadata compares what each operating system displays side by side.

What is actually in the file?

Here is the whole of our test photo, grouped.

Most of it is machinery. The interesting part is the last row.

What did the photo not contain?

Coordinates. Not one GPS field out of 209.

So "remove the location" would have removed nothing. On the iPhone we tested, the same action cleared 20 fields; here there was nothing to clear.

Where does the location hide when there is no GPS?

In Samsung's private block, under a field called MCCData.

Its value takes the form Country (NNN): a country name followed by its mobile country code, the number that identifies a mobile network's country. The phone recorded which country its network belonged to.

No gallery shows this field. Google Photos does not display it, the Samsung gallery does not display it, and neither does the Details panel on a computer.

The same block holds a second timestamp, accurate to the millisecond and carrying the time zone offset, duplicating what EXIF already stores.

A photo with no coordinates, then, still narrows down where it was taken and when, to the country and the second.

What is in the rest of Samsung's block?

Nobody outside Samsung knows, and that includes the tool doing the reading.

Of the ten fields in that block, ExifTool decodes two: the timestamp and the country code. The other eight come back named after their own hex identifier, as Samsung Trailer 0x0a01, 0x0aa1, 0x0c61, 0x0cc1 and 0x0cd2. The name is the address, not the meaning.

That is normal. Manufacturers reserve a section of the file for whatever they find useful and they do not publish the format. Apple does the same thing on a larger scale: the iPhone we measured carried 54 such fields against Samsung's ten.

The practical consequence is short. You cannot audit what you cannot read, so if a file is going somewhere public, the safe assumption is that the private block travels with it.

How do you read the fields your phone hides?

Read the file itself.

Open the photo in our EXIF and metadata viewer. It lists every field, grouped in plain language, and flags the ones that reveal something about you. Nothing is stored: the image is processed and the temporary file deleted straight afterwards.

Send it from your phone in a way that keeps the original. A messaging app will not do it: we tried four files that had been through one, and every one arrived with the camera fields gone. Use a cable, or attach it to an email at full size.

What should you check before posting a photo?

Three fields decide most of it, and you can read all three in one pass.

Coordinates, if there are any. They put a pin on a map at the metre, which matters more for a photo taken at home than for one taken in a station.

The country code and the time zone offset, which survive when coordinates do not. Neither gives an address, and together with a date they narrow things down more than people expect.

The device model and its serial number, when the camera writes one. A model on its own says little. The same model with the same serial across several photos ties them to one owner.

Everything else, the aperture and the colour profile and the container structure, describes the photograph rather than the photographer.

How does an Android photo compare with an iPhone photo?

Both keep far more than their galleries admit, and they hide different things.

The iPhone's problem is volume: clearing the location leaves 89% of the file in place, which how to remove photo metadata on iPhone counts in detail. The Samsung's problem is different. There was no location to clear, and a country sat in a field the phone never shows you.

How do you remove it?

The phone's own location function will not reach Samsung's private block. Nothing built into the gallery does.

Open the photo in our metadata remover. The privacy preset clears the private block along with serial numbers and coordinates, and you download a clean copy. Your original is not modified. How to remove metadata from a photo covers the built-in methods and where each one stops.