GIF Metadata Viewer — Comment and Application Blocks

The format predates the question

GIF was finished in 1989, before digital cameras were a consumer product and years before anyone specified EXIF. Nothing in it was designed to record who took a picture or where, and no revision ever added it. A GIF cannot carry a camera, a lens, a capture time or coordinates — not because they were removed, but because there has never been a place to put them.

What it can carry instead

Two things. A Comment Extension holds plain text, which encoders sometimes use for a watermark or a tool name. An Application Extension holds eleven bytes of identifier followed by whatever that application wants — this is how the Netscape 2.0 block stores the loop count that makes an animation repeat, and how XMP gets smuggled into a GIF when a tool insists on writing it.

Colour is a table, not a profile

A GIF picks at most 256 colours and lists them in a colour table, globally or per frame. There is no ICC profile and nowhere to put one, so the same file can look different between two screens with nothing in the file to correct for it. This also explains the dithering you see in a photographic GIF: the image was fitted to a table that small.

The shape of a GIF

A GIF opens with a header and a description of the canvas, then repeats a run of blocks — a frame, the extension that times it, and any comment an encoder left behind — until the trailer ends the file.

Structure
Can hold metadata
The picture

Where a GIF keeps things

Header: GIF87a or GIF89a. Extension blocks only exist in 89a.
Logical Screen Descriptor: Canvas size, and whether a global colour table follows.
Global Color Table: Up to 256 colours for the whole file.
Comment Extension: Plain text. The nearest thing a GIF has to metadata.
Application Extension: An identifier and its data. Loop count lives here; so does XMP when present.
Graphic Control Extension: Frame delay, transparency and disposal. One per frame.

Questions about GIF

Does a GIF contain EXIF or GPS data?

No. The format has no structure that could hold either, and never has. If you need to know whether a picture is traceable, a GIF is the one format where the answer is fixed in advance.

Then what is there to inspect?

The file structure — canvas size, colour table, frame count and timing — and any comment or application block an encoder left behind. The tag table shows what is actually present rather than an empty EXIF section.

Why does cleaning a GIF return a PNG?

Because Re-encode Cleanup redraws the image on a canvas, which holds one frame and writes PNG losslessly. You get exact pixels for that frame, and the animation does not survive.

Can a GIF identify the software that made it?

Sometimes, through a comment or an application block. But GIFs are re-encoded so often on the way around the internet that anything a first encoder wrote has usually been dropped by a later one.

What it can do

Remove EXIF data: Drop a photo and download a copy with its embedded metadata removed. JPEG loses its EXIF segment losslessly; HEIC, PNG, WebP and the rest are re-encoded. Nothing is uploaded.
Remove GPS location: See the coordinates a photo is carrying, then download a copy without them. JPEG loses the location tags and keeps everything else. Nothing is uploaded.
Edit JPEG EXIF: Change the title, author, description, copyright, software and capture time on a JPEG, then download the edited copy. Runs locally; your original file is never modified.
XMP, IPTC and ICC viewer: Read every metadata group a file carries — EXIF, XMP, IPTC, ICC, maker notes — grouped and exportable as JSON. For asset QA, forensics and debugging a pipeline. Nothing is uploaded.
Open several photos: Open up to fifty photos, see which of them carry a location, and take the whole set out as a spreadsheet. Nothing is uploaded, and the originals are never written to.