MakerNotes: the camera maker's private block in your photos
MakerNotes is the EXIF block where camera and phone makers store their own undocumented data. What it holds, what we found in iPhone and Samsung photos.
What are MakerNotes?
MakerNotes
MakerNotes is the EXIF tag, number 0x927C in the Exif sub-directory, that reserves a block of the file for the manufacturer. The Exif standard defines where the block sits, not what goes in it, so every brand writes its own format and rarely publishes it.
Everything you can read inside comes from reverse engineering. ExifTool decodes the entries its authors have worked out, and names the others after their raw ID. That is why a report can show a field called 0x0a01: the name is an address, not a meaning.
What did we find in real photos?
We read two phone photos field by field.
| iPhone 16 (iOS 26.6) | Galaxy S24 | |
|---|---|---|
| Fields in the whole photo | 177 | 209 |
| Fields in the maker’s block | 54 | 10 |
| Decoded into a readable name | Mostly undocumented Apple entries | 2 of 10 |
On the iPhone, close to a third of everything in the file sat in Apple’s block, none of it shown by the Photos app.
The Samsung block was smaller and more telling. Of its ten fields, ExifTool decoded two: a timestamp and one called MCCData. Its value takes the form Country (NNN), a country name followed by the mobile country code of the network the phone was on. That photo carried no GPS coordinates at all, and it still named a country.
Why do MakerNotes matter for privacy?
Because nobody sees them. Phone galleries, Windows Properties and macOS Preview show a summary of the standard fields and skip this block entirely. Data that leaks from here leaks without anyone having looked at it.
What turns up depends on the brand. Some cameras store a body serial number, which links every photo from that camera to one owner. The Samsung photo stored a country. Our report flags both kinds of field when it finds them.
How do you remove them?
Individual entries cannot be edited safely. The format is private, and a wrong guess about a field’s length or offset corrupts the file. So the choice is all or nothing.
In our metadata remover, Protect my privacy removes the whole block together with the location, serial numbers and author name. Erase everything removes it too. Either way, the image itself is not re-encoded.