EXIF Data in Digital Photography

EXIF Data in Digital Photography is a standard set of metadata for digital images which shows up by operating systems, image editing or other tools and online image uploading websites. EXIF Data is loosely said which stands for Exchangeable image file format was created by Japan Electronic Industry Development Association ( JEIDA ). If you have opened a digital image properties on your operating system, or have uploaded to places like deviantArt, you probably have seen that the manufacturer of camera, model, shutter speed, ISO and other parameters shows up. In this article we will discuss about EXIF Data in Digital Photography.

Basics on EXIF Data in Digital Photography

Exif data is directly integrated to the images of compatible formats – in the header of the binary file. Meanwhile, it puts almost everything about every digital camera in this information set apart from when the shot has being taken, the camera application of most mobile phone camera also create images with EXIF Data.
Here is an example of EXIF data shown in deviantArt in sidebar :

And here is how by default shown on OS X (10.8) :

There are specific Free and Paid softwares only to get more detailed EXIF Data.

More on EXIF Data in Digital Photography

The latest version of EXIF Data is 2.3. The labels ( tags ) for metadata defined in the Exif standard cover a broad spectrum including:

• Date and time information. Digital cameras record the date and current time and stored in the form of EXIF metadata.
• Camera settings. This includes static information such as the camera model and manufacturer, and information that varies with each image such as orientation, aperture , shutter speed , focal length , exposure meter and film speed in ISO.
• Location information, which may come from a GPS connected to the camera, or cellular-phone towers and WiFi hot-spot for mobiles.
• Description and copyright information, this is something that most adds them did when subsequently processing the image, only the high-end cameras allow the user to choose the text for these fields.
• There are actually various fields, which includes the name of the Image Editing Software, if edited by Adobe Photoshop it shows the OS version too.

EXIF data several times has been in question as for the for the manufacturers, it is opt out option. However, despite the issues of privacy and secrecy, it to some extent helps a new user to learn or advanced user to judge the settings used for the imaged. EXIF data can be partially Edited or fully removed for the most commonly used formats.