You might have heard the acronym EXIF in conjunction with digital cameras. EXIF allows for additional information such as shutter speed, aperture and resolution to be associated with a photo file. EXIF ensures that cameras can document such information while other software can read and use it. Here is how.

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. EXIF does not define a completely new file formatin other words EXIF does not replace the familiar JPG or TIFF files. Instead EXIF defines a set of tags and semantics that can be added to existing formats such as JPG and TIFF to provide more information about the photo. For example JPG files use application marker segments to include EXIF information while TIFF files use the TIFF tag options. A more accurate description of EXIF would be an extension to current photo file formats that allows the documentation of extended photo informationso for example a JPG file can include EXIF information.

So what kind of information is recorded by the EXIF extension? It really depends on the camera that you are using. Some cameras do not use EXIF at all while most cameras record the basic settings in which a photo was taken such as aperture, shutter speed, ISO value, resolution and more.

We will not go over all the possible information EXIF can store as this is a very long list but we will go over some of the more important commonly used ones: