Every photo remembers
Uncover the hidden story
in every photo you click
Every photograph you take carries a hidden record written by your camera at the moment the shutter fires. Snap Trace reads that record and reveals the exact date and time the picture was taken, down to the second, alongside the precise GPS location, which is reverse-geocoded into a readable place name, the nearest recognisable landmark, and a direct link to the spot on a map.
Beyond the raw metadata, an optional AI-powered scene description looks at the image itself and describes what it sees — the landmarks and architecture, the cultural context, and the mood of the moment. It is a quick way to write captions, add alt text for accessibility, or make a large photo library searchable by what is actually pictured rather than by filename.
Built for travellers, bloggers, photographers, and families piecing together old memories, Snap Trace is completely private by design. Everything runs inside your browser: there is no account to create, no photo is ever uploaded, and nothing is stored on any server.
Select a photo to trace it
How Snap Trace works
Every photo your camera takes carries a hidden block of information called EXIF metadata — a small record written into the file at the moment the shutter fires. It holds the date and time, the camera settings, and, if location services were switched on, the exact latitude and longitude where you stood. You never see it in the picture, but it travels with the file.
Snap Trace reads that record and turns it into something you can actually use: a readable date, a place on a map, and an optional AI description of what the photo shows. Everything happens inside your browser — the image is never uploaded, stored, or sent anywhere.
Choose a photo
Pick any JPEG or HEIC from your device. The file is read locally by your browser and never leaves it.
Metadata is decoded
Snap Trace parses the EXIF block directly from the file’s bytes, handling the different coordinate formats used by each phone maker.
See when & where
The timestamp is formatted, and coordinates are matched to a place name and a map link so you know exactly where it was taken.
What you can learn from a photo
The When panel shows the camera’s own clock reading at the instant of capture — useful for putting undated holiday pictures back in order, settling arguments about which day something happened, or confirming when a document or receipt was photographed.
The Where panel converts the stored coordinates into a readable address and the nearest recognisable landmark. That turns a folder of unlabelled travel photos into a record of the route you actually took, and it can jog memories that the picture alone does not.
The optional AI description looks at the image itself rather than the metadata, describing the scene, the setting, and anything notable in the frame. It is helpful for writing captions, adding alt text for accessibility, or making a large photo library searchable by what is in the pictures.
Why some photos have nothing to show
Metadata is fragile. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook re-compress images and discard the record entirely, so a photo forwarded through a chat arrives with no date and no location. Screenshots capture the screen rather than the original file, and carry only the moment the screenshot was taken. On Android, Chrome receives photos through a system picker that removes GPS coordinates before any website can read them. The FAQ below explains each of these and what to do about them.
Guides & further reading
In-depth articles on photo metadata, privacy, and getting more out of your photo library.
A plain-English tour of the hidden information inside every photo — what each field means and why it exists.
PrivacyWhich platforms keep your coordinates, which strip them, and how to check before you post.
OrganisationTurn thousands of unsorted images into a clear timeline of where you went and when.
MemoryUsing dates, coordinates, and context clues to work out where a forgotten picture was taken.
WritingHow location and timing details turn a generic caption into something worth reading.
TechnologyWhat vision models actually see, where they are reliable, and where they get things wrong.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the location missing when I use Chrome on my Android phone?
Android removes it before Snap Trace ever sees the photo. Since Android 13, the system photo picker strips GPS coordinates out of any image you hand to an app or website. There is no prompt, no warning, and no setting a web page can change — the file that reaches your browser has already had its coordinates deleted, even though the empty location tags remain inside it.
This is why the same photo can show its location in your phone’s gallery app but not in Chrome: the gallery reads the file directly from storage, while Chrome receives a copy that Android has scrubbed.
Ways to see the location anyway:
- Open Snap Trace in your phone’s built-in browser (for example the OnePlus, Samsung Internet, or Mi browser) instead of Chrome — these often use an older file path that keeps the GPS data.
- Copy the photo to a computer over a USB cable and upload it from a desktop browser. This always works, because nothing is stripped along the way.
- Upload from a cloud copy stored at original quality (such as Google Drive), then open that file on a desktop.
Google has been testing an “include location” permission prompt for the Android photo picker. If it ships, Chrome uploads should keep their coordinates again.
Why does my photo show a date but no location?
Date and location are stored in separate parts of a photo’s metadata, so one can survive while the other is removed. A missing location usually means one of these:
- Location Services were off in the camera app when the photo was taken, so no coordinates were ever recorded.
- The phone had no GPS lock — common indoors, in basements, or on planes. The camera writes zeroes instead of a position.
- The photo was shared through an app such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, or Telegram, which delete all metadata.
- You are on Android using Chrome, where the system removes the coordinates (see the question above).
If Snap Trace detects that a photo still contains empty location tags, it will tell you the coordinates were stripped rather than never recorded.
Why do WhatsApp photos and screenshots never have any data?
WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram re-compress every image they send and discard the metadata in the process. The photo you receive is a new file that never had a date, location, or camera information — so there is nothing for any tool to read. Filenames like WhatsApp_Image_2026-07-27_at_22_00_08.jpeg or IMG-20260727-WA0001.jpg are a reliable sign of this.
Screenshots behave the same way. A screenshot records what was on your display, not the original photo, so it carries only the time the screenshot was taken.
To see real data, use the original file straight from the camera — typically named something like IMG20260728103237.jpg.
Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?
No. Reading the date and location happens entirely inside your browser using JavaScript. Your photo is never sent to a server, never stored, and never leaves your device during that step.
Two features do contact outside services, and only with limited information:
- Place names: if a photo contains coordinates, those numbers alone are sent to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to look up an address. The photo itself is never sent.
- AI scene description: this is optional and runs only when you press the button. Pressing it sends a reduced-size copy of the image to the AI model for that single request.
Which phones and file types are supported?
All of them, as far as the metadata allows. Snap Trace reads JPEG, HEIC/HEIF, PNG, WebP, and TIFF files.
Manufacturers store coordinates in several different formats, and Snap Trace handles each one — including Apple iOS, Google Pixel, Samsung One UI, Xiaomi HyperOS, OnePlus OxygenOS, OPPO ColorOS, Realme UI, Vivo FunTouch and OriginOS, Honor MagicOS, Motorola, Nothing OS, Sony Xperia, ASUS ZenUI, Huawei HarmonyOS, Fairphone, and the Tecno, Infinix, and Itel range.
The location looks slightly wrong. Why?
The coordinates come from the photo itself, so Snap Trace shows exactly what your camera recorded. Small errors are normal: a phone can be accurate to a few metres outdoors but drift much further indoors, between tall buildings, or when the GPS had only just started up when you pressed the shutter.
The address is a separate step. Snap Trace asks OpenStreetMap which place is nearest to those coordinates, and in areas with sparse mapping the closest named place may be some distance away. The coordinates and the map link remain accurate even when the place name is approximate.
Can I add or restore location data to a photo?
Not with Snap Trace — it only reads metadata and never modifies your files. Once coordinates have been stripped by a messaging app or by Android, they are gone from that copy and cannot be recovered from it.
If you still have the original file (on the phone that took the photo, in a cloud backup at original quality, or on a computer), that copy will normally still contain the coordinates.
What does the “When” time actually mean?
It is the camera’s own clock reading at the moment the shutter fired, recorded as local time without a time zone. Snap Trace shows it exactly as written, so a photo taken at 9:58 PM in Bengaluru reads 9:58 PM wherever you view it.
If a camera’s clock was set incorrectly, or was never adjusted after travelling across time zones, the recorded time carries that error — there is no way to detect this from the file alone.