Viewing a digital photo’s EXIF metadata can provide all kinds of useful information, including the date and time the original image was taken, the camera used to take it, exposure and ISO settings, shutter speed, metering mode and a whole lot more. And seeing some of this can be as simple as clicking on the image in Explorer (the bar at the bottom of the window will show you a few key tags).

Displaying more EXIF data can be a challenge, though, even if you try a third-party image viewer: some display only a few tags, others force you to open a new window each time to see the relevant information, and a few ignore it altogether. So if you prefer an easy life then you might be interested in Photo Data Explorer, a simple image viewer which pays particular attention to a photo’s metadata.

The program earns plus points immediately for its convenience. There’s no installation required, no bulky DLLs, no unwanted extras at all – just download the 1.2MB executable and you can run it right away.

The interface is reasonably straightforward, too. You can open an individual image, but you’ll probably prefer to open a complete folder. Once you’ve done that, any photos it contains are displayed in thumbnail form in a panel on the left. Clicking one displays it in the central pane, and a toolbar then provides the usual image viewer-type features (zoom in, zoom out, rotate, flip, step backwards and forwards through the folder, and so on). You can even resave the image as a Photoshop PSD file, amongst other formats.

Click on a thumbnail on the left, you'll see all its EXIF tags in a panel on the right

The key here, though, is the tabbed pane on the right. By default this displays up to 50 EXIF tags (the author’s site tells you which ones). If you only need the basics then clicking on the Summary tab will show just the main 15 (Make, Model, Title, Subject, Keywords and so on). And there’s a third tab, Maker Data, which currently doesn’t show much at all (on one test image it displayed “White Balance”, “Focus Area”, and “Quality”, “Quality”, “Quality” – yes, three times), but presumably that’s just a beta-related bug of some kind. It doesn’t get in the way of the other tabs, regardless, so we just ignored it.

As an image viewer, Photo Data Explorer is very basic. File format support is limited, presumably because it’s mostly about the metadata (you can’t view PNG files, for instance). You can’t view photos full-screen. And it’s not suitable for even simple photo management (you can’t select multiple images, and the program doesn’t provide access to the regular right-click Explorer context menu).

If you just need a quick, portable viewer with easy display of EXIF metadata, though, Photo Data Explorer could already be very useful. And of course it’s very new, so there’s still hope that its image viewing abilities will improve over time.