Image metadata

Image files carry text about themselves. Cameras write where and how a photo was taken; AI tools often write which model made it. Sens reads all of it in your browser.

What is read

• EXIF. Camera make and model, lens, exposure, ISO, aperture, focal length, orientation, color space, timestamps, and GPS latitude, longitude and altitude.
• XMP. Adobe's extensible metadata: creator, rights, edit history, and the fields Firefly and other tools use to label AI output.
• IPTC. Caption, keywords, credit and copyright, common in news photography.
• PNG text chunks. Free-form key/value pairs. Stable Diffusion front-ends (Automatic1111, ComfyUI, InvokeAI, Fooocus, NovelAI) routinely store the full prompt and parameters here.

AI generator tags

Many AI tools identify themselves in ordinary metadata. Sens looks for them in the EXIF Software field, XMP packets and PNG text chunks:

• "Made by OpenAI", ChatGPT and DALL·E markers
• Adobe Firefly's XMP credit
• Stable Diffusion parameter blobs and prompts
• Local-tool signatures from ComfyUI, Automatic1111, InvokeAI, Fooocus and NovelAI

A match is reported as declared evidence: the file says an AI tool made it. That is enough for an "AI-generated" headline, with the caveat that metadata can be edited. Editor names alone (Photoshop, Lightroom) are not treated as AI signals, because real photos pass through them constantly.

Midjourney strips almost all metadata from its output, so Midjourney images are usually decided by the visual detector.

What empty metadata means

Most of the web strips metadata. Social platforms, messaging apps and screenshots all remove it. An image with no EXIF is normal and proves nothing; an image with a camera model and GPS trail is a mild signal that a real camera was involved, and the verdict says so.

Privacy

Metadata is parsed on your device. It leaves your device in two cases: if you sign in and save a report, and if you turn on AI summaries, which send the extracted metadata text (never the image itself) to the model that writes the summary. Sens is a read-only inspector: it does not remove or edit metadata. To strip metadata before sharing, use exiftool or your operating system's built-in tools.

The EXIF viewer page runs the same analyzer with the explanation focused on metadata.