Wrote a parser to extract image metadata once, and got massively frustrated with the amount of undocumented, semi-documented, wrongly documented, or partially documented attributes. You’ll find references online, but most of them lack half of what you encounter in images. Every image processing app under the sun adds its own range. Some use metric values, some imperial; finding out which can be guesswork. Aperture is given in f-stops, decimals, or literal fraction strings. Some attributes hold sentinel values. Some vendors have custom conventions for undefined data.

It’s a jungle out there.

Exif is technical debt in the most flattering sense. Messy, old, and still quietly useful decades later.

Exif is great but here is your obligatory reminder that if you are publishing images you should strip out some of the identifying information that cameras and image editing software likes to embed.

In particular, you probably don’t want the GPS coordinates of your house publicly available on your blog for everyone to see.