Reference
EXIF tags explained
What the fields inside a photo record, where they sit in the file, and what happens to them when you edit, share or clean the image.
EXIF, IFD0, tag 0x8298
Copyright
A rights notice you publish on purpose. It belongs in EXIF, IPTC and XMP at once, and it is not a privacy leak.
EXIF, Exif IFD, tag 0x9003
DateTimeOriginal
The moment the shutter fired, to the second. Photo libraries sort by it, and it carries no time zone.
EXIF, GPS IFD, pointer 0x8825
GPS tags
Coordinates, altitude, speed and the direction you faced. An iPhone photo carried 20 of them.
EXIF, Exif IFD, tag 0x927C
MakerNotes
A private block each manufacturer fills in its own undocumented format. It can name a country or a serial number.
EXIF, IFD0, tag 0x0112
Orientation
Tells software how to turn the picture for display. Lose it and portrait photos appear sideways.
EXIF, IFD1, tags 0x0201 and 0x0202
ThumbnailImage
A small JPEG stored inside the photo for quick previews. It is a separate image and is not always updated.
What are EXIF tags?
An EXIF tag is one named field in the metadata a camera or phone writes into a photo: the capture time, the exposure, the orientation, the GPS position. Each tag has a numeric ID fixed by the Exif standard, which CIPA maintains, and a name that tools such as ExifTool use to display it. Orientation, for instance, is tag 0x0112.
A single phone photo carries far more than a handful. An iPhone 16 photo we read field by field held 177 fields; a Samsung Galaxy S24 photo held 209. Most are technical and harmless. A few say where you were, when, and with which device.
Why only these tags?
This reference covers the tags people actually look up, each with an example measured on a real file. The rest are listed, grouped and explained in plain words in the report of our photo metadata viewer, and the families they belong to are described in what EXIF data is.