What is EXIF metadata, and does a watermark export keep it?

EXIF, the Exchangeable image file format, is maintained by the Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) together with JEITA. According to CIPA, the standard was established in 1995 as a standard image format for cameras that can record metadata, and it is now used in the majority of consumer imaging devices, smartphones included. Version 2.0 added the GPS section for location in 1997, version 2.31 added the time difference from UTC in 2018, and version 3.0 in 2023 moved text to UTF-8, added tags such as Photographer and ImageEditor, and set guidelines on which tags an editor should update or may delete. The current edition is Exif 3.1, published in January 2026 as CIPA DC-008-2026.

CIPA groups the tags into three families: image structure, including the resolution values XResolution and YResolution and a value that records how the camera was held so viewers can show the picture upright; shooting conditions; and other information, meaning the capture date, time and location, the names of the camera, lens and software, the names of the owner, photographer and image editor, and a description of the image. Artist and CameraOwnerName hold people, ImageDescription holds a caption, Software names the program that last wrote the file, and ImageUniqueID makes a capture traceable. None of this is drawn into the picture: CIPA defines metadata as additional data that is separate from the data itself, which is why it stays invisible until a program displays it.

In a JPEG, the Exif block is stored as a unit of its own rather than inside the compressed picture data. PNG has a dedicated chunk: the third edition of the PNG specification states that the data segment of the eXIf chunk contains an Exif profile, that only one eXIf chunk is allowed, and that if the image has been edited after the profile was created, the data might no longer apply. WebP follows the same idea; Google’s container specification says metadata can be stored in EXIF or XMP chunks. In every format, whether metadata survives a save depends on the program writing the file: one that copies the block keeps it, one that builds a new file from pixels does not.

EXIF is not the only metadata layer. XMP is, in Adobe’s words, a file labeling technology that lets you embed metadata into files themselves, and it has been an ISO standard (16684-1) since 2012. The IPTC Photo Metadata Standard sets the industry standard for administrative, descriptive and copyright information about images, such as captions, credits and usage terms. Content Credentials based on the C2PA standard are a signed record of who made a file and what changed, explained in the AI watermark explainer. All of these layers are data attached to the file, and all of them depend on the saving program to be carried forward.

Browser tools draw your image onto a canvas and ask the browser to encode the result. The HTML standard defines what that produces: the browser must create an image file in the requested format with the bitmap’s pixel data. Nothing in that procedure reads the original file’s metadata blocks, so anything that lived beside the pixels, whether EXIF, XMP or IPTC, is not part of what gets written.

AI Watermarks decodes the image you choose with the browser’s createImageBitmap function, draws it together with the watermark on a canvas, and encodes a new JPG, PNG or WebP with canvas.toBlob. We checked the result with exiftool on 6 November 2026 using a JPEG that carried capture date, author, copyright and location tags: the JPG, PNG and WebP downloads kept the pixel dimensions and contained no EXIF, XMP or IPTC at all. The JPG and WebP files carried an sRGB colour profile, the PNG carried none, and the JPG’s JFIF header listed a density of 1 × 1 with no unit. If you need that data, keep the original: the download is an additional file, not a replacement. To delete metadata without re-encoding the picture, use the EXIF metadata tool, which leaves the pixels as they are.

Orientation is handled before anything is drawn. createImageBitmap defaults to the from-image setting, which MDN describes as the image oriented according to EXIF orientation metadata, if present. The picture is decoded upright, the watermark is placed on the upright picture, and the exported pixels are already the right way round, so the file no longer needs an orientation value; the width and height shown in the editor are those of the upright image. The date and filename watermark tool stamps the current UTC date rather than the capture date, because the editor never reads that field.

Because location has been part of EXIF since 1997, a photo from a phone can carry the place it was taken, and owner names, captions and exact times can be just as personal. A visible watermark neither reads nor changes any of this: a copyright line added with the photo copyright watermark tool tells viewers who owns the image, but it writes nothing into the metadata. You can inspect metadata in the file information panel of macOS Finder or the Details tab of Windows file properties; for the complete picture, including XMP and IPTC, the open-source command-line program exiftool lists every tag and can copy tags between files. If the data matters, archive the original before watermarking; if it is a liability, the fresh export is an advantage, because a watermarked document copy or listing photo arrives without the capture location or device details.